I would concur that script.aculo.us is geared towards visual effects, moreso, but it does have some good controls for data entry. More important would be the Prototype library that backs the package. There are a number of pieces that fit well together with that group -- Prototype (base), Behaviour (nice code), script.aculo.us (clean visuals), and Rico (more sophisticated Ajax controls).

Judging a package by the number of developers on the project seems a bit silly to me. Although, if you consider that, by extension, the entire Ruby on Rails movement uses the aforementioned libraries, I s'pose the numbers game could be played.

Technically, I like the shortcut notations provided by Prototype. I like the cleanliness of the code. I like that it barely needs documentation to permit users to take advantage of how it works.

I won't make a pass against Dojo -- I haven't given it a fair go and can't say that I like it more or less.

So far, my only complaint lies in the reasoning -- the quality of the technical solution takes greater priority, and this discussion should focus on that.


-- DMK


On 10/20/05, Praneet Kandula <pkmlist@gmail.com> wrote:
Dojo is a one stop shop, which we need. Xajax is only for the server
requests, scriptaculous is mostly for the visual effects (we really
don't need that many). Dojo has both, and an awesome javascript model.
The only thing they're missing is docs, and pretty demos (ala
scriptaculous), and they are about to turn out 0.2, which should take
care of both of those.

As far as code bloat, dojo has a mature packaging system taht only
gives us the files that the project uses, and not a single file more.
it's actually a unified toolkit, meaning it's code consists of many
different code toolkits from prior to 2003. Basically the code is
mature, and the developers (note the S, as scriptaculous has only 1
developer who does it as a hobby) know their stuff, having worked on
javascript for over 5 years. Again, they have 2 programmers workign
fulltime on the toolkit.

To answer the "massive code rewrite" question, i think it'd be xajax
that would. Since dojo isn't tied to any one language, all we need to
do is modify the javascript. I think no matter what toolkit we go
with, we'll have to do that anyway, so I'm not sure i see your point.


On 10/20/05, Mark Constable <markc@renta.net > wrote:
> On Thursday 20 October 2005 11:19, Christopher A. Watford wrote:
> > On 10/19/05, Praneet Kandula <pkmlist@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > If I were to suggest an Ajax framework, then it'd definetly be the Dojo Toolkit
> > > (http://www.dojotoolkit.org). It has an extremely healthy base of developers,
> > > and all of them are well respected in the DHTML community. It has the backing of
> > > multiple companies, so it's not dependent purely on volunteer development.
>
> > Dojo is clean, intuitive, and heavily developed. I highly suggest using it.
>
> Most of the Dojo examples do not work with Konqueror,
> which may also mean Safari does not work(?)
>
> xajax may be simpler but it does work with Konqueror
> and does not require a massive development effort
> because it "just works".
>
> --markc
>
>
>


--
--
Praneet Kandula
pkmlistTAKEMEOUT@gmail.com (remove TAKEMEOUT from email]