What happened to Dojo in 2008?

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+15 Q:

What happened to Dojo in 2008?

Many of you have seen this graph of Google Trends of popular AJAX frameworks (Dojo, jQuery, YUI).

The graph seems to make it clear that interest in Dojo collapsed in the second quarter of 2008, falling by 80%; jQuery picked up the slack and ultimately grew to more than triple the size of Dojo.

Why? What happened in Q2 2008 that demolished interest in Dojo?

(Note that I'm not really interested in a comparison of Dojo vs. jQuery; even if you can explain why one is better than the other, it's hard to see why that suddenly became clear to the world in April 2008.)

+36 A:

Eugene Lazutkin 2010-03-16 02:40:51

Your post just made me want to try Dojo. :) The quality of the average jQuery plugin is really below par, and the official jQuery Plugins page is not making it easy to sift through the mess. Although I loves me my jQuery, I think I'll see if I'll have a better experience with Dojo.

deceze 2010-03-16 04:21:54

As for the generic term, that should actually *help* Dojo's numbers. The "dojo" wasn't qualified in any way. Also, what you dismiss as "marketing" is that John Resig is, dare I say it, a Javascript god and has written many useful posts about that (and jQuery). Look at another data point like tag count on SO (28k vs 700). You contribute to Dojo and I respect that but it's ludicrous to suggest jQuery isn't orders of magnitude more popular and dismissive to suggest marketing is the reason for this.

cletus 2010-05-26 21:56:45

About generic terms: explain why Mickey, Elvis, and Marilyn less popular than jquery. Hint: the secret sauce is how Google cluster trends. Generic terms lose. Regarding gods - it is up to you to select/proclaim/promote them. My humble opinion: I respect John, but he is no god, sorry. Regarding your other claims: I never suggested that jquery is unpopular, or tried to quantify it in any fashion; and I never claimed that marketing was the main reason for jquery's popularity. But I do feel that jquery has the best social component around. That was the point of comparison.

Eugene Lazutkin 2010-05-27 03:53:36

+1: very interesting answer from insight, thanks for sharing.

Marco Demajo 2010-08-19 16:44:10

+1 A:

I'm also an occasional dojo committer, and even with a clarifying "javascript" in the trends search, you get jquery leading:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=jquery,dojo+javascript,yui+javascript&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

That said, I believe they serve different audiences. Dojo (and now Google's Closure) are "full-strength" toolkits with tremendous depth and tooling, designed to be used by engineers for gmail-scale applications.

JQuery is designed to be used by designers to spice up a page.

You can use dojo's selectors api to do JQuery-style coding, just as you can use JQuery facilities to do more "application-like" development.

My guess is that there are far more designers and web pages than there are engineers and web applications.

Gavin 2010-04-01 01:14:53

+1 A:

The Mikey Mouse chart linked above has a different range. Here it is without the YTD parameter, which paints a different view: jQuery still has not reached Elvis' pinnacle back in 2007. Additionally, comparing with a real generic term shows generic terms do not "lose". Cat dominates. (http://www.google.com/trends?q=jquery%2C+cat%2C+dojo%2C+elvis+presley%2C+mickey+mouse)

That being said, I do love Dojo and jQuery. Thanks and gratitude are due to both project teams for making the rest of our lives so much easier. Eugene, thank you for taking this opportunity to provide useful insight into the Dojo project. Gavin, I agree with your perspective on the target audiences for each of the tools. There need not be just one.

Vulcan 2010-06-03 18:13:20

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What happened to Dojo in 2008?

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