[thelist] UI libraries

sam foster potatosculptor at gmail.com
Fri May 1 08:55:26 CDT 2009


You should consider (or at least be aware of) dojo  -
http://www.dojotoolkit.org

There's a couple ways you can get it, dojo "Base" has parity with
jquery (roughly) in terms of its functionality, but the "dijit"
project has all the UI widgets and is a pretty mature codebase, with
a11y support (ARIA, high contrast and keyboard) and easy to extend and
build on. YUI I think still wins hands down on documentation, but the
gap is closing. ExtJS is still has the most out-of-the-box visual
polish and consistency. I favor dojo for 2 reasons:

the community/philosophy: its a 100% open source project, with commit
rights available to anyone who has demonstrated ability etc., the
toolkit has clean IP (all contributions must be covered under a CLA
(contributor license agreement)

the breadth - I like to say dojo grows with you. If you just want a
library of conveniences and browser-normalization for common DOM
operations/querying, animations, ajax etc, dojo Base (26K) has you
covered. But as your project and requirements grow, its got the GUI
widgets, the OO infrastructure, the different remoting transports,
charting, a range of data stores and data layer abstraction.. the list
goes on. It has a unit test framework, build tools for compression and
optimization, doc tools - but they are they for you only when you need
them.

There's an active IRC channel at #dojo, and forum and mailing list,
and events going on around the world for the community. Sitepen (my
employer) offers commercial support and development services for/with
dojo (among other things) which is handy if you get in a bind, or need
to divide and conquer on a project.

If you're contemplating a re-write in PHP, the Zend Framework / Dojo
combination is a powerful one, that lots of people seem to like.

/Sam

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Eduardo Kienetz <eduardok at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 7:53 PM, Judah McAuley <judah at wiredotter.com> wrote:

> Well, I'm gonna rewrite an old web application (now in PHP), and one of the
> reasons to the rewrite is to improve the UI. I wasn't planning on using 2 JS
> libraries, but maybe I'll see how that works. Perhaps I could have wrapper
> functions so I could easily switch from one JS library to the other too,
> thus being able to measure performance, etc.
>
>
>> JQuery really rocks the house for pure utility. It is light weight and
>> great for programmable front end work. If you are looking at eye candy
>> interface stuff, JQuery UI is pretty decent and coming along nicely.
>> It doesn't have all the controls that some other frameworks do but the
>> theme roller is great, so if you are looking at a multi-design site,
>> JQuery UI is the way to go IMHO.
>
>
> Yeah, I'll definitely use JQuery, but I didn't know of JQuery UI, that's
> nice!

[snip]

> I'm done analyzing JS libraries.

Sorry for the late entry..



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