Chapter 9. Data Abstraction

A common bane of web development is writing routines to parse data that is returned from the server into a conveniently accessible format for the core application logic. While many good routines have been developed to parse common response types such as comma-separated values (CSV) and JSON, a lot of boilerplate is still involved in wiring it all up, issuing updates back to the server, potentially maintaining synchronicity between the local store and the server, and so forth. This chapter introduces Dojo's data APIs, which provide a uniform interface for handling data sources—regardless of where they're located, how they're accessed at the transport level, and what their format may be.