[Dojo-interest] Dojo marketing

[Wojtek Augustynski]

I love Dojo.
I don't see a better solution out there.
That being said, I ask why is it that Dojo is so under-promoted?
jQuery has a huge community exposed on the web. Dojo does not. It seems All we have is this distribution list.
I'm sure I don't have to itemize to this distribution why Dojo is the only viable solution to projects big and small.  I wasted my time with jQuery because the strong cheer leading force out there told me its the way to go.
The point of this email is to put this up the community.  It is in all of our best interest that the we see better market saturation then jQuery and other toolkits out there.
I don't see a meetup distribution for the San Francisco and East Bay area so I'll start there. Please look for it there.
Thoughts?
 

[Torrey Rice]

There's a lot of reasons. Some are that we dropped the ball on documentation two years ago and we're still playing catch up. Without docs people didn't get how to use Dojo. Since dojo is so complex and has so many facets and it is used on so many big projects the core users weren't the overly ambitious blogger type. jQuery had an easy to understand message, it did one thing really well (query) and they built from there. Dojo did everything for anyone. Lots of people blogged with tutorials for simple 'wowie' stuff with jQuery which got more people into it and the ball kept rolling. More blogs, more exposure and more marketshare. They did their marketing right.

So we finally started getting our act together and telling people how great dojo is. We have updated our site for the first time in a few years and we're still working towards a next release of the site with even more info. We updated our docs and are continuing to improve it. We still need people blogging about dojo and giving easy to understand examples that have that 'wowie' effect as a way to get people into dojo. Showing off the hardcore stuff that's really cool to us (like data stores and charting) is fine but we have to understand that the vast majority of people don't care about that stuff.. they want to quickly add effects and do dom manipulation and there's ample blog posts and tutorials out there for almost every use case. So copy and pasting is really easy.

In short, we shot ourselves in the foot in the 0.4 days, we corrected that with 0.9 and 1.0 and we're working hard to try to get the message out there and I'd love ideas on how to do that.

Torrey Rice
SitePen, Inc.

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[Wojtek Augustynski]

Isn't Sizzle (the jquery selector engine) a dojo foundation project? :)

I didn't mean to sound like I'm criticizing the marketing efforts.  I wanted to open up the community conversation so as we all understand that promotion is in each developers best interest. 
Providing a modularization solution and promoting a standardized OO design (pseudo) are no small things.

Any Rails developers out there interested in doing a dojo gem a bit more involved then Drails?

[Karl Tiedt]

Yes it is, and its even a configurable build option to replace
dojo.query() with Sizzle's selector routines in our build util :)
(although I believe not all functionality carrys over when using the
Sizzle selector engine)
-Karl Tiedt

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 12:30, Wojtek Augustynski
<waugus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Isn't Sizzle (the jquery selector engine) a dojo foundation project? :)

[Torrey Rice]

I'm glad you're interested in helping. Your comments are totally constructive. 

One thing I am starting to work on is showing how to do some common jQuery stuff with Dojo. There's a ton of "Top 20 jQuery things" lists and most of them are easily convertible to dojo. 

There's this great site that shows some of the differences of each toolkit which is definitely awesome for anyone to check out

http://matthiasschuetz.com/javascript-framework-matrix/en/dom-manipulation

I think a lot of people are scared off by dojo because our message hasn't been very strong about what it does and how easy it actually is to use.

[James Burke]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Wojtek Augustynski
<waugus...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Any Rails developers out there interested in doing a dojo gem a bit more
> involved then Drails?

If you have not already, you should contact Bob Remeika directly about
drails -- he is really interested in getting Dojo to be a first class
citizen in Rails. Traditionally, there have not been many people in
the Dojo community that involved in Rails, but Bob has been.

James

[the...@spiffyjr.me]

I have done a few wow things in Dojo lately that I will write up a few blogs on. one was a nifty animated drop down menu and the other is a popout login box like Twitter has.

Kyle Spraggs
WWW.SpiffyJr.me

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