Dojo and jQuery mobile

In Chapter 1, Introduction to Mobile Web ArcGIS Development, we discussed the difference between frameworks, libraries, and toolkits. These terms are somewhat subjective. At the end of the day, these are all built on JavaScript. They are simply structures and tools that make development easier and faster.

Mobile development conversations in relation to these structures and tools often revolve around the use of Dojo and jQuery Mobile. It's worth spending a little time discussing both Dojo and jQuery.

Note

The ArcGIS API has been built using Dojo. However, as we will show later, jQuery Mobile can still be used with the API.

Dojo

Dojo is one of the many open source JavaScript frameworks that is used for constructing dynamic web user interfaces. At its core, it is a simple collection of JavaScript files. One line in your code referencing dojo.js is all you need to access these files:

 <script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/dojo/1.9.4/dojo/dojo.js"
 ...