The tutorial has shown in detail how to access a document on
the intranet which adheres to JavaScript Object Notation making an AJAX call
built into the dojo tool kit (version 0.4.1, a new 0.4.2 has
been released recently). With certain advantages that JSON enjoys over XML,
usage of JSON has been leveraged by Yahoo and other sites. In the interest of
completeness which many first time users are sure to appreciate, what may
appear to be repetition of code in the listings is intentional. Each
listing can be separately tested. It is shown that with dot notation the
details of the JSON object can be accessed; however for this, one needs to know
a priori the structure of the JSON object. This
perhaps is a disadvantage compared to using XML which is self-descriptive
unlike JSON. The Dojo Toolkit also provides what is called a filtering table, a
much better suited GUI for display which can be scripted to filter and sort
data. Trying to fill this table with the retrieved result is not straight
forward when the object is nested as in this case.