In the beginning was the demo... and as all demos fund-raising demos, it had to be sexy, get straight to the point and be quick to build.
As I needed "Web 2.0" javascript controls to put on these pages and impress the investors, I chose the Dojo framework.
Why Dojo ? Well, just because it was on the online press at the right moment, and I have to say their demo page was sexy and efficient at that time.

That was last year.

Now guess what ? I'm still sticking with the same javascript framework, which I recently migrated to its newest version.
Why Dojo, once again ? After the demo (which actually came along with a speech and a business plan), things went pretty fast and I found myself dealing with the real thing, with no extra time to spend on a javascript benchmark.
That said, I didn't even think of putting my choice into question - it was there and running, and everyone seemed pretty satisfied with it. Especially now that I've put more time into understanding the 0.9 architecture, I'm quite satisfied by my early choice.

So what's the point of this post ? When Dojo released their new online documentation - The Dojo Book - in September, I stumbled upon why Dojo ? and realized that the "race for production" I had been thrown into made me forget that there was something else than Dojo out there : not only the six major toolkits mentioned on the Dojo book, but also a couple others.
Seeing all these projects made me want to try more stuff, just to see how they would fit into our existing sites, if we wanted to replace Dojo by something else.

Anyway, since my boss would probably choke if I took our precious time to change something that already works, I'll just take a couple of hours here and there to see what each of them can do. Better to be aware than blinding oneself just because choices have already been made - at least that's true in the context of IT :)

---

This post has been completed while listening to :

Just One of Those Things (Lionel Hampton & Oscar Peterson)