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I've found jQuery to be very easy to use, especially for simple stuff. I was up and running with jQuery in about 30 minutes, though I had to implement some UI logic myself-- with Dojo that was already built, but it didn't do what I wanted, so I spent a while struggling with it before giving up.

jquery -- http://www.jquery.com/

It's interesting, it basically just does two main things well: 1. provides a nifty function for getting a handle on a DOM element using either XPATH or CSS selector syntax, fairly painless once you figure out the selector/path syntax, and 2. has some functions for sending JSON or XML requests to the server and getting the response sent to a callback function (that's the AJAX part).

I would also choose jquery over all of them and not just for Ajax. It basically provides the power of CSS for the DOM, which allows you to build stuff like an accordianin in only 10 lines of javascript!

I would also choose jquery over all of them and not just for Ajax. It basically provides the power of CSS for the DOM, which allows you to build stuff like an accordianin in only 10 lines of javascript!

"jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript." - jQuery homepage

jQuery is great because it's really small and really easy to use. I know very little about js and have absolutely no interest in learning all the gotchas related to cross-browser js development so I leave it to jQuery to do that for me. jQuery allows me to use js in a powerful way, easily and quickly.

It's disappointing to not see jQuery in that list as if to say it's any less well made than the others.

...I find is quite nice :)

http://jquery.com/

is jQuery and it's plugins.

is jQuery and it's plugins.

There are also JavaScript libraries that work at a lower level (which makes integration much easier). I use JQuery which has a nice cross-browser way for accessing DOM elements, a few bells and whistles, and, most important, a standard way to access the server via their Ajax methods. Nothing revolutionary (I've never used it but I think Prototype does the same thing) but easy to use and seems to be very well supported.

However, for my next "clean" Ajax project I think I'm going to give GWT a try. I've done it by hand... now that I understand a little bit about what's going on under the hood I'll let Google handle the details.

John Resig, lead developer of the jQuery library, has already written about this alliance. Choice quote:

This is all (hopefully) an overreaction. But the very fact that no non-legally-backed entities exist in the alliance (and the fact that no good corporation would sign a legal agreement ambiguously defining the status of an "organization") leads me to believe that many of today's poplar JavaScript libraries are intended to be left out of the drafting of the OpenAjax requirements.

OpenAjax Alliance.

That said, I have no idea why this alliance is needed, even after reading most of their site. We already have Prototype, MooTools, jQuery and other great libraries. I'd be perfectly happy if Microsoft could just make IE fully support CSS instead of joining this buzzword-masturbating alliance...

I wouldn't go down the prototype/scriptaculous route. Those libraries are powerful, but so is jQuery, and it's much more lightweight and easier to learn. Fun, even.

If you want to understand unobtrusive javascripting (which is the only way to go really, unless you don't mind your site's content being invisible to search engines), PPK's book is the best I've seen.

Allow me to quantify that. The combined market share of IE, FireFox, Opera, Netscape and Mozilla is 94%. I'm willing to be most of the remaining 6% were also a browser that supports JS (Konqueror, Safari. Yes there are even text browsers that support it.) If you scroll further down, that have statistics showing 9/10 people browse with JS enabled.

I personally think JS as it stands today is dandy in terms of what be accomplished on the client side. There is a tendency to forget that most people still have a modem, and adding 70kb worth of libraries to every single page load is simply ridiculous (scriptaculous, I'm looking at you.) But some of the newer lightweight libraries are just amazing. Everything is moving in that direction; hell, even /. recently picked up some JS functionality, so you know it must be ubiquitous :)

However, when you start playing around with AJAX, you get a whole different abstraction of what you're doing. Basically a lot of GUI elements start to become part of the play, and it becomes a whole new ball game. Everybody is realizing this and building libraries, but none has reached a status yet where I'd consider it the great definite GUI toolkit, for the web using AJAX. This means that commiting to any of the current incarnations is like commiting to a dinosaur from the start.

This means when your AJAX complex reaches a fair amount of complexity, one is kinda stuck. Basic hacks don't cut it anymore, doing a great lib yourself is a complete project on itself, and commiting to other libs has the disadvantages named above. But I might be overgeneralizing.

I think I found middleground with the Jquery library: http://jquery.com/

It's tiny (15K) yet powerful and takes a whole lot of work away, and therefore meets most of my requirements.

AJAX btw is quite enjoyable. On one hand you have the marketeers screaming blah at you like "web 2.0" for everything, and at the other hand you have the average ol' skool slashdotter screaming blah and fud at you for anything javascript or faintly smelling of "web 2.0", to point out their superiority ;) I haven't seen so many smartasses since Gopher was hailed over Mosaic 0.9b as more secure, less bandwidth demanding, thus making the later unnecessary and bloated.

This code is crap. Use of <a href="javascript:"> makes it same quality as <marquee><font color="#ggggg">OMG Web 2.0!</td></font>

Unlike TFA, here are some resources worth reading:

• http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html
• http://www.onlinetools.org/articles/unobtrusivejav ascript/
• http://jquery.com

Umm,

Where is the tree widget for Prototype again? OMG there is none!

Prototype has some nice features and allows for OO like programming in Javascript. But it mangles the Javascript Object and the OO design promotes code bloat.

Anyone doing any serious DHTML should check out JQuery (http://jquery.com/), it's a revolutionary lightweight Javascript library that borrows the niceties of Prototype but allows you to achive the same result in a fraction of the code. You can also use it with Prototype, and it weighs in at 10k to boot!