Introduction

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Dojo build layers provide a clean path from development to production when using Dojo for your UI layer. In development, you can have load-on-demand, rapid application prototyping; a build layer takes all Dojo dependencies and compiles them to a single file, optionally stripping whitespace and comments, and performing code heuristics to allow further minification of variable names. Additionally, it can do CSS minification.

In order to create a build layer, you would traditionally create a JavaScript file that has dojo.require statements for each dependency, and optionally some additional code that might run when the script is loaded. As an example:

dojo.provide("custom.main");

dojo.require("dijit.layout.TabContainer");
dojo.require("dijit.layout.ContentPane");
dojo.require("dijit.form.Form");
dojo.require("dijit.form.Button");
dojo.require("dijit.form.TextBox");

This script is generally referred to as a "layer" script.

Then, in your application's layout, you'd instruct Dojo to load this module:

<html>
<head>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/dojo/dojo.js"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
        dojo.registerModulePath("custom", "../custom/");
        dojo.require("custom.main");
    </script>

If you use Zend_Dojo to do this, you'd do the following:


<?php
$view->dojo()->registerModulePath('custom', '../custom/')
             ->requireModule('custom.main');

But since Zend_Dojo aggregates your various dojo.require statements, how do you create your layer script? You could open each page and view the generated dojo.require statements, and cut and paste them into a layer script file manually.

However, a better solution exists: since Zend_Dojo aggregates this information already, you can simply pull that information and build your layer file. This is the purpose of Zend_Dojo_BuildLayer.

Introduction

Zend Framework