ucantblamem

Anyone working in web-related industries these days, knows well that there has been an influx of frameworks in the last couple of years. It’s not as if they’re a new concept; you only have to take a quick glance around to see a plethora of rapid development frameworks. The one’s that come to mind are things like Django for Python, Symfony for PHP and of course Rails for Ruby - which I personally feel popularised web-frameworks in our day and age. However, if you dig deeper you begin to see how over-populated this space is.

JavaScript, which is technically known as ECMA Script, has most definitely come under attack from this epidemic. This simple language alone has Prototype, Scriptaculous, JQuery, YUI, Mootools and more (Qooxdoo, Dojo, EmergeTK etc)… Just google it, you’ll see what I mean.
As a front-end developer this has caused me much anguish. I have tried all of the named libraries, each time moving on to the next “big thing� (or small thing as I tend to prefer). Mootools, however, has caused me to pause for a moment. While this ultra-light framework is relatively unknown and by far the most un-documented, in the last couple of days I have come to discover how powerful and extensible it is.

The framework has been smartly developed in modular form, much the same way linux is developed. When downloading Mootools you are presented with certain options which allow you to package up JUST the modules you “need� and compress them for fast loading.

I have been a long-time subscriber to “Web Standards with Imagination� - the awesome Podcast from Dustin Diaz. In the last 3 episodes Dustin has given us screencasts of him developing applications using the YUI (he works at Yahoo!), which has proven to me that the YUI is by FAR the most powerful and cleverly written framework out there currently. Though, I remain look-warm about YUI, simply because it caters for far more than what I need and still requires me to write a lot of lines to achieve results.

Mootools on the other hand, has all the tools I “need� (and more) and allows me to achieve results quickly, with as little code as possible.

So, today I use Mootools. I wonder what I will use tomorrow???

P.S: Anyone interested in me doing a screencast? What would you be interested in seeing?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.