Series Introduction

It's tough to make a Web application without some JavaScript nowadays. Discounting, as if you could, the wild froth that seems to be flying from the lips of every marketing analyst to make the corporate Website buzzword compliant by heaping on pointless amounts of AJaX, some Web applications are actually better with a little client-side help.

Fortunately one of the many benefits of the OSS movement is the ready abundance of kits being actively developed and supported.
Recently I had to pick one for a ColdFusion project - and then I had to make it work...
The results of which I will cover in a short series of blog articles I'm calling ColdFusion Driven Dojo.

The Rationale

With the dizzying amount of frontend-focused development going on in these projects, sometimes the least amount of attention is devoted to the server side. Rather than making things better and more helpful sometimes they have a tendency to make things more Balkanized.
Examples of integration with server-side technologies often become equally polarized as the JavaScript framework team picks its favorite application server and things get slanted that direction. It's understandable, but unfortunate. There is only so much time available in the day and trying to speak to every member of your potential audience is a bit daunting.
So it falls to the user community to shore up the gaps.

So I had to pick a kit, and after consulting Wikipedia I selected Dojo.
What follows are the lessons, tips and tricks that I gleaned from working with my choice.

• Part 1: Installation
• Part 2: Stores, Structs and Queries
• Part 3: General Tips
• Part 4: ColdFusion and JSON