Today I gave Dojo 0.9beta another try. I wasted few hours and than went back to v. 0.4.
Dojo is a somewhat unsettling project. From one side, it looks like a great Javascript toolkit, it gets many and good reviews, it has nice widgets and a sound programming design. On the other side, its developers seem to do their best to discurage people from using it.
Their site is slow and badly designed, the sw that manages their forum is coarse, there are practically no demos, the examples that come with the sources are too basic, there are no documents that give you the big picture, to understand how to use it you must resort too often to read the source code, but what is worse, the transition from v 0.4 to 0.9 is a real pain in the ass.
First of all, your code based on v 0.4 doesn’t work any more, and you have to make a real porting to use v 0.9. They wrote a porting guide to help it, but after reading it I had no clue of what to do. In other words, the porting guide does not guide you much. They decided that the 0.4 widgets did too much, so 0.9 widgets are a stripped down version of what they had before. What the poor guy that invested on v0.4 has too do now that the bloated features on which he based its design have been removed?
It is true that they say to have plans to add enhanced widgets that bring back the removed features, but I have preferred if they stated somewhere that this beta is feature incomplete and advice people not to try a port right now.
I hope that they address these problems in the future since I really like this toolkit.