If you write JavaScript at any level you most likely have used or at least heard of the ever so popular libraries that everyone is using. If not, here’s a quick overview of the perks that each one I’ve checked out has in one form or another.
- Standardize Browser Inconsistencies – Since we all enjoy the way IE and family tend to do things a little differently, libraries help with the frustrating details.
- Ajax Helpers – if you’ve ever tried to make your own class to handle cross browser ajax calls, you realize why it took so long for ajax to become mainstream; it sucks. With helper functions the process is as trivial as typing in 1 line of code.
- Extends Core JS Functions – Yearning for a ‘getElementsByClass’ or a ‘document.onload’ that actually works? yep, got it.
- Wickedly-Nasty-Awesome Effects – With all the different animations available you’ll be tempted to fade, dropdown, color cycle and slide every element on the page.
In the past I’ve used Prototype, jQuery, MooTools and Dojo but after a few JS-heavy projects I’m sold on jQuery. The syntax is clean and easily understandable, because of this you can generally understand what a function does without even looking at the documentation. It’s mega-lightweight at 14k; compared to Prototype being the most bloated at 124k plus another 45k with script.aculo.us for effects.
I could go on about how much I like jQuery, but go ahead and save yourself some debugging headaches and check it out.
2 Responses to “JavaScript Libraries”
November 10th, 2007 at 3:29 pm
meekish Says:
Come one now, you’re comparing the minified and gzipped version of JQuery with the uncompressed version of Prototype. Slightly misleading, no?
November 11th, 2007 at 4:23 pm
Rabbit Says:
Good point. JQuery still wins though when comparing apples to apples.
The uncompressed minified JQuery weighs in at 45.3KB while the uncompressed minified Prototype weighs in at 90.5KB