"jQuery is primarily a JavaScript library for doing DOM manipulation, Ajax, events, and effects. Dojo is a more comprehensive toolkit that offers those same features, but also includes many other pieces that facilitate building rich web applications, such as patterns for code organization, tools for abstracting data syncing between server and browser, internationalization, accessibility, templated widgets, graphing and charting, rich UI widgets, and much more. Dojo also provides dependency management and build/optimization tools for creating a production-ready JavaScript application." Rebecca Murphey [1]
Rebecca also gives a detailed description of her first foray into Dojo coming from jQuery. [2]
Personally, I think Dojo's lack of good documentation/reference code, lack of 'marketing', and relative complexity keep it from becoming popular. It's much easier to get started with another library like jQuery because of all these factors. However, once you get over that initial steep learning curve, Dojo is great!
Check out the new docs. I think it's no longer reasonable to say Dojo lacks good docs or reference code.
Marketing is challenging for engineers. We tend to not go crazy over every small feature, but focus on the big stuff. That said, we're improving our approach.
The tutorial section looks much improved over previous visits - good job.
Two points:
1. The tutorial shows using the CDN, then there's big warnings saying "don't do this in production". Give another demonstration of the "highly recommended" approach vs leaving people to piece that together themselves.
2. "we tend to not go crazy over every small feature". What's a small feature to you may just be something that 80 people have been waiting patiently for. While you can often judge what a 'big' feature is by your standards, dismissing many other things as 'small' probably misses a lot of people.
Point 1. is indeed a "uncomfortable" part of dojo. Getting started is difficult. For a lot of demo and hello world like apps CDN version is fine, assuming they are only using the modules packaged into dojo.js on CDN. If you start using other modules, then you will soon see a escalating number of HTTP requests, and for this reason using CDN version for production is bad idea.
Its just not that easy to get started with and get a sane production build from dojo yet. Hope all of this will change by the time 2.0 is out.
Rebecca also gives a detailed description of her first foray into Dojo coming from jQuery. [2]
Personally, I think Dojo's lack of good documentation/reference code, lack of 'marketing', and relative complexity keep it from becoming popular. It's much easier to get started with another library like jQuery because of all these factors. However, once you get over that initial steep learning curve, Dojo is great!
[1] http://www.quora.com/Rebecca-Murphey/answers/Dojo-JavaScript...
[2] http://rmurphey.com/blog/2009/11/12/dojo-confessions-or-how-...
edit: corrected name to Rebecca