This Document is Out of Date. For the current documentation, please see http://docs.dojocampus.org/

Dojo applications look good, but their primary benefit is in helping real people solve real interaction problems in real web application. Dojo makes it easy to design a more usable web experience for the intended audience.

The following personas illustrate how people with different goals and skill sets can make Dojo work for them. We will follow them working through an example. The personas and examples are made-up, but broadly represent who the toolkit is built for and each section of the book is designed to help solve problems for each of them, sometimes more for one than the others, but always for their users:

John Walsh is a Web Developer. He’s been out of college for 3 years and he works for a small company that creates web sites for clients. He lives and breathes HTML and CSS. He has some basic JavaScript experience, for example with click handlers.  He knows a lot about Photoshop, but if you ask him most days, he doesn’t really consider himself to be a Designer. Several of his older co-workers would call themselves Designers and only incidentally Web Developers. John and his co-workers care greatly about how an interface looks, they are completely sold on CSS, and they want their tools to work the way they think they should.

Andy Tso has been doing the "startup thing" for nearly a decade. He's seen it all and is a very discerning consumer of technology. He couldn't get enough of his CS and math courses when he was at Stanford. After graduation Andy didn't really know where he wanted to go, so he started on an advanced CS degree at MIT but dropped when some of his other friends left to found an e-commerce thing in '98. It imploded quickly but by that time he'd caught the startup bug. His current startup is pushing the edges of what you can (or should) do in a browser and when they started investigating Dojo, they saw it wasn't everything they needed, but certainly a good starting point. Andy is the kind of guy who could have written Dojo but is wise enough not to. He might contribute patches, though. Andy's main problem is getting through the gunk to the hard tech docs and giving his junior Developers something to work from.

Laura Allen is an Enterprise IT Developer. She has worked for the same (medium sized) company over the past 15 years as it has been bought out twice and renamed three times. She supports internal development sites and relies on tools and frameworks all day long. For her, Web2.0 is tremendously exciting. She didn't know you could do much of anything in a browser, but things that aren't Java/PHP scare her a bit. She’s heard that Microsoft mentioned a toolkit too but her manager saw a Dojo demo at a conference and now he’s pushing his teams to investigate Dojo.