You could still do this with strictly javascript. I mean, it's certainly more elegant and nice to have a helper like the urlUtils but isn't that hard to do otherwise. Here's a snippit that zooms the map to a lat/long if passed as a parameter in the URL:
htmlPagePath = window.location.toString();
qLocation = htmlPagePath.indexOf('?');
if (qLocation < 1){
passedLatLong = false;
} else {
passedLatLong = true;
}
if (passedLatLong)
{
var coordStr = window.location.toString().substr(qLocation + 1,window.location.toString().length);
var coords = new Array();
coords = coordStr.split(',');
var bridgeLoc = new Point(coords[0],coords[1], new SpatialReference({wkid:4326}));
var theLatLongPoint = new Point(coords[0],coords[1], new SpatialReference({ wkid: 4326 }));
var webMercatorPoint = webMercatorUtils.geographicToWebMercator(theLatLongPoint);
map.centerAndZoom(webMercatorPoint, 16);
map.resize();
}
This just assumed that the url was something like "http://server/folder/index.html?-122,48"
You can easily adjust this to be "...?parcelId=xxxx"