[MTOS-dev] [ProNet] Javascript Library Standardization

[Chad Everett]

Moving to mtos-dev, per Byrne...

I have to say that I actually don't like YUI.

It is an advantage that it doesn't come from your own servers, I guess, 
so bandwidth is a potential savings, but it does come from somewhere, 
meaning your clients are going to have to get it.  If you're worried 
about bandwidth that much, then it could be an issue.  You could use 
expires headers and versioning to take care of that to some degree if 
you really care that much.  And from what I've seen in my limited 
testing, YUI sucks - both in terms of the amount of bandwidth it uses 
and in the usability.

I'm not a JavaScript pro by any means, but in a simple comparison test 
over Lightbox implementations, Prototype was the far-and-away most 
common implementation.  I eventually settled on Mootools for my personal 
solution [1], because I liked it for what I could do with it.  Later, I 
adapted AjaxRating to use Mootools, meaning I stripped down AjaxRating's 
size, which saved me some bandwidth (though this was probably evened out 
because I had to add Ajax libraries into Mootools to do it).  Mootools 
is distributed packed by default, which I like, and it plays nice with 
about everything.  There are some exceptions that I personally have 
found [2], but it does work well and even though I don't do much 
JavaScript, I have had no problems picking it up.

Prototype, in my experience with Lightbox, is big.  Really big.  Yes, 
you can compress it/pack it, but it still comes in larger than Mootools, 
if not by much.  The jQuery implementation of Lightbox didn't have the 
features I decided I wanted, so I didn't go with it, but it seemed to be 
of a similar size - and I have seen that it's fairly well-regarded.  
YUI, on the other hand, had a horrible Lightbox implementation and 
didn't do what I wanted anyway.  Plus it was slow.  I don't know if it 
was compressed or not, but delivery was worse than if it came from my 
servers - I would expect more from someone like Yahoo!

[1] 
http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2007/12/27/enhancing_the_display_of_images_on_your_site_with_slimbox.php
[2] 
http://jayseae.cxliv.org/2007/12/21/easily_add_ratings_to_your_site_with_outbrain.php#comment-239211

--
Chad Everett
Everitz Consulting


Su wrote:
> I think YUI is the one that doesn't sit well on the same page as other 
> libs, which would be a big minus, as it's not only plugins that are 
> going to potentially be including them but direct user manipulation of 
> templates.
>
> It's much more likely that someone is going to add jQuery/Prototype 
> (cf. Lightbox and Thickbox for obvious examples) than YUI.
>
> It also seems to have a tendency to get huge once you start adding 
> modules.
>
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