Andy said:
Richard Cornford said:
OK, sorry. Do you know of any toolkits that are worth using in this
respect? I'm using dojo (dojotoolkit.org) at the moment. Do you think it's
better to use a toolkit or just work through all the problems yourself??
Andy said:
Richard Cornford said:
OK, sorry. Do you know of any toolkits that are worth using in this
respect? I'm using dojo (dojotoolkit.org) at the moment. Do you think it's
better to use a toolkit or just work through all the problems yourself??
I'm no expert but these are my impressions so far...
I like Ruby a lot but don't want JavaScript to look like Ruby. It's an
extra layer. I was avoiding Prototype.js for a while; however, now with
the very cool .rjs templates in Rails, Prototype.js is becoming more
tightly integrated into Rails. I think this dependence is unfortunate
but the .rjs templates are very cool and big timesavers. As Rails
becomes more popular, it is inevitable that Prototype.js will also
become more popular. Hopefully Prototype.js will continue to improve.
I tried a bit of Dojo. It is a big library and seems like it might be
hard to understand it. Also the demo sites all seemed very slow. The
dynamic loading of libraries (or some such fanciness) could have been a
problem for speed? All this could be wrong but I only found things I
didn't like and never went "Wow this is cool!". Also the markup for
Dojo widgets seems like a nightmare. They are able to claim
non-intrusive JavaScript but the HTML tags have many attributes to get
info to the JavaScript. Seems like a complicated way to avoid a tiny
bit of easily understandable JavaScript.
The ajax toolbox looks good
http://www.ajaxtoolbox.com but the license
may cause you trouble.
I've been enjoying the connection.js and event.js libraries from Yahoo!
UI
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
The Yahoo! dragdrop.js library seems reasonably good too. However I
don't like how it is necessary for every draggable element to have an
id. I'll live with making up dummy id's for elements for now. I hope
they eliminate this requirement soon. Also I don't know if you can set
the scope for the interesting moment functions. I haven't found any
docs indicating yes.
Wading thorough all these libraries is a lot of work. You'll have to
experiment. Certainly the Yahoo! UI core libraries are worth a look.
- Peter