Migrating from Dojo 1.1.1 to Dojo 1.3/1.4

Question

We are in mid of a project where we have used an extended Dojo 1.1.1 to meet the customer requirement and add richness.

But there are quite some bugs and performance problems with this version of Dojo and we are looking ahead to migrate the Dojo version to overcome both the issues, but the migration cycle seems to be quite painful and may not be yield expected result. The concern we have is with the various extension which we have created with the version of Dojo for components that were provided in 1.1.1 and the impact on them after migration.But, the advantage we see are equally important.

As per Dojo , they have kept some level of compatibility with version 1.1.1 but i have not seen any discussion around this anywhere.

1. Has any body else previously done migrated between Dojo version?

2. Will the components like Grid will work as expected or will i need to carry out a refactoring exercise?

3. Do we have any commercial support available as the forum seems to deprecated?

Any help or suggestions are welcome

Answer 1

Dojo has had a policy of freezing and supporting public APIs since 1.0. Migrations prior to 1.0 were extremely painful. Now, it should be much better, provided you use only public APIs. Code written for stable JS APIs in Dojo or Dijit in 1.1 should largely still work. Exceptions are noted in the release notes, which you should explore (good luck finding them... unfortunately the site is a bit of a mess)

If you wrote any custom widgets, you're probably in for some extra work. dojox.grid was not particularly stable at that point, and it has also seen a major rewrite since then (there is an old 'compat' layer you may wish to use)

Regarding for forum, like the note says, you can either use the active dojo-interest mailing list or post questions here at SO. There are some firms which offer commercial support, but that's outside of the scope of Dojo as an open source project. (try googling 'Dojo commercial support' or asking on dojo-interest)

Answer 2

I have done 5 dojo migrations now (from 0.2 -> 1.4) over the last few years. Although the API does not change, you will often have coded in workarounds that no longer work after upgrading. Things I have noticed:

• quality in 1.4 is VERY good and worth upgrading to (even from 1.3)
• although the API does not change, little things that are not public often change slightly (diji.Tree itemNodeMap -> itemNodesMap in 1.4)
• build options are usually added each release but not always publicised - strage really as they are always useful improvement
• since you are 1.1.1, you should change all your set attribute calls to 'attr' - this could take a while to do.

As for commercial support, you could try Sitepen