Sorry for the lack of daily linkage and commentary, but I had a crazy week. I’ve been doing a lot of this with the help of this and this. I even wound up buying this and this. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not much of a JavaScript programmer, but after a week of full immersion, I feel like I am starting to really get it.
August 5, 2007 at 3:34 pm
I’d advise some caution with regards to Prototype. While it’s a really well written library and demonstrates some very smart programming, it does extend JavaScript’s built in types. Most of the other JavaScript libraries have started moving away from doing this because it can make it harder to write code that is compatible with other libraries – if two libraries both define a String.strip method with different semantics then code written against those libraries is no longer compatible.
mooTools is much worse than Prototype when it comes to this. jQuery, MochiKit, YUI and (I think) Dojo all get this right.
August 5, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Yeah, Prototype definitely does not play well with others. But it does play very well with Ruby on Rails. I’ve considered taking a whack at Yahoo UI instead. I think it may be the winner in the end.
August 7, 2007 at 5:24 pm
Do those libraries overlap in functions? I’m still trying to figure out what I should use, or even what the various libraries strengths are.
I’ve used YUI so far for some things and been happy. But also used DWR for a bit of AJAX and been happy with that too, although I don’t care that much about the Java support (marshalling/unmarshalling data from strings is not a particularly big deal to me).