The Dojo data API is a set of interfaces that data providers can implement so Dojo widgets and other application components can access external data. In DOJO-speak data providers that implement these interfaces are called data stores. A number of widgets supplied by the toolkit are capable of accessing data from these data stores. By presenting data as generic items with attributes they hide the underlying complexity of both the structure and access mechanism from consumers of the data. A good example of such a data store is the ItemFileReadStore, which is capable of reading JSON data in a specific pre-defined format from a remote location represented by a URL. Other data stores in various states of maturity are available in the extensions package (DojoX).

In a J2EE-based Web application information to be displayed on the browser is often encapsulated as a JavaBean on the server. The DWR library allows JavaScript on the browser to call a method in a remote Java class. JavaBeans returned by this remote method are made available in JSON format to the caller. In this article we will combine DWR with Dojo to create a data store that can be used by widgets to fetch JavaBeans from the server and consume them as JavaScript objects.