I program computers for a living. And as you know well, one of the occupational hazards is getting all gushy over programming tools. It's like woodworkers raving over a particular brand of buzz saw (or whatever they rave about. I dunno.)
Dojo (http://www.dojotoolkit.org) well earns my gush. Superficially Dojo is a JavaScript library in the same vein as jQuery or Prototype. A library, to me, provides stuff I know that I need. I have a great affection for libraries .... Apache Commons comes to mind as a masterpiece of librarydom. But they don't mess with your head, they don't help you dream or architect anything.
Dojo messes with your head. All of a sudden, you begin seeing a world where the browser does the heavy lifting. Server languages like PHP, ASP and JSP ... even nice ones like Ruby on Rails ... are not as important in this world. They might provide data and proxy services to the browser, but not much else. The important reusable components are built in JavaScript.
In the next few columns, I'll show how Dojo short-circuited my Java-based server-centered world.
