You're right in that a package shouldn't be judged by the number of developers, and that's not what I was saying - forgive me for not being more clear.
What I was saying is that Dojo development occurs a lot faster because of the number of developers. Regarding the quality of the code, if you look at the developers behind dojo, you'll find that every single one of these guys has been working with DHTML for over 5 years, and most of them have a lot of experience developing a javascript framework. Because of this, I, and I'm sure others, believe that Dojo maintains a well rounded featureset, and a high quality of code.
As far as comparisons go, I think this page summarizes the javascript frameworks out there pretty well:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/AjaxLibraries
As you can see, Scriptaculous, or Prototype doesn't support IE 5.x, which could lead to a few problems. Dojo on the other hand, supports IE 5.5 onwards, and includes safari & opera support. Also, another good thing is that it's ajax support automatically includes iframe backup, which means if a browser doesn't support xmlhttprequest, it still works through iframes. Scriptaculous/prototype don't have this as far as I can tell.
On 10/20/05, Daniel Klein bildzeitung@gmail.com wrote:
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]
--
Praneet Kandula pkmlistTAKEMEOUT@gmail.com (remove TAKEMEOUT from email]