Dojo Toolkit

In the early years, our team was working with many Fortune 500 companies who were attempting to migrate decades-old legacy systems to the internet and JavaScript was not the common choice for building these complex apps. When it was being used, the same components were being rewritten from scratch in unstandardized JavaScript, over and over again so rather than duplicating effort with every new application, developer advocates and companies came together to build a powerful JavaScript toolkit that would help to catapult the language into what it has become today.

Helping to create the Dojo Toolkit was our first foray into applying our knowledge and expertise into solving early problems of the Enterprise and what would become a long history of establishing, maintaining and validating the usefulness, efficiency and necessity of open source software.

• Enterprise JavaScript – As early contributors to the Dojo Toolkit, we led the charge on understanding and addressing the constraints of complex web and enterprise applications. From internationalization and accessibility to data grids and charts to performance and security, our shared priority was building a robust foundation to meet the needs of the enterprise at every turn and ensuring our customers were adhering to best practices and standards of the day.
• Efficiencies of Scale – No longer captives of proprietary software, the Dojo Toolkit brought together teams from around the world to capitalize on the shared development efforts via open source software, participating in the journey of JavaScript becoming the world’s most used programming language, helping companies benefit not only from the engineers they employed but from engineers at powerhouses like IBM, Mozilla and others who standardized and shared code to the open source ecosystem.
• Provide Developer Ergonomics – Dojo aligns with modern standards and patterns without the cognitive overload of every design decision. For example, Dojo currently leverages webpack for various build optimizations, but most applications built with Dojo will never need to think about webpack configuration as Dojo does the right thing based on the application architecture. Dojo provides efficient tooling for creating and testing applications and UI widgets, type safety and accuracy via efficient TypeScript ergonomics, and much more.
• InnerSource – The broad acceptance of open source software demonstrated that distributed teams could effectively and efficiently collaborate across space and time, laying waste to the idea that developers needed to be side-by-side in cubicles to complete projects. From this sprouted the idea of shared repositories, codebases and methodologies across multiple, internal teams. Our work continues with our customers today in helping large companies InnerSource their code and instill the open source methodologies that enable effective and engaged teams.

Since its inception more than 15 years ago, the SitePen team has made substantial contributions to the Dojo Toolkit; providing the stewardship required to ensure the stability, maintenance and quality of the as part of the JavaScript ecosystem.