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Open Source AJAX toolkits
twofish writes "InfoWorld columnist Peter Wayner recently reviewed six
of the most popular "open source" Ajax toolkits. The article sets
out to see if they are enterprise ready in comparison to commercial products
such Backbase, JackBe, and Tibco's General Interface. The six open source projects
covered were selected because each has a high-profile in the developer community
and support of one or more stable organizations. "
The toolkits covered are:
Whilst the definition of open source is broad, the round-up is quite helpful.
- Dojo
- Google Web Toolkit
- Microsoft Atlas
- Open Rico and Prototype
- Yahoo AJAX Library
- Zimbra Kabuki AJAX Toolkit
Whilst the definition of open source is broad, the round-up is quite helpful.
This column uses an interesting definition of Open Source.
From the article:
Microsoft's Atlas may not be open source -- the license includes terms that would rankle a devotee -- but the code you create with the system is yours to license as you like, and you'll be able to create Atlas apps with few practical restrictions.
Oh. Is that what Open Source means? That I can create apps with it and license them how I like? Well, crap, Visual Studio must be open source too!
Last I checked, neither Atlas nor GWT were open source in any sense of the word, though at least GWT will run on real servers.
This is in response to Google's toolkit, which allows users to code in Java instead of Javascript. I think this feature is a real winner to Java coders. Who wants to code Javascript when you can use Swing? Regardless of what TFA says, there is a difference between the two programming experiences.
In summary, if you are already proficient in Java, Google is the way to go.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Or just write the ten lines needed to do XMLHttpRequest calls yourself (there, that's the AJAX part taken care of), and for all other effects write your own functions just like always (copy/paste from your personal library and adapt), so you don't have to deal with bloat, nine out of every ten functions being unneeded, and far too many levels of abstraction and generalization, and have the benefit of actually being able to quickly debug the script when you encounter a problem!
The only organizations where these toolkits might be useful are the really really large ones where there's a team that can dig into the framework and basically "make it their own". Everything smaller, using occasional contractors to maintain the code, benefit far and far more from simplicity, readability and maintainability than from dubious-quality top-heavy frameworks with lack of code-level documentation and thousand and one edgecase-bugs. (Spoken like someone who's had to trace such bugs in the mess of prototype and scriptaculo.us; I've only _looked_ at Dojo, Rico, Yahoo and Zimbra (and not at all at the other two), but my impressions were that what they made up in better code quality, they lost in bloat.)
If you're doing Java/J2EE work, you should really have a look at DWR
It makes it disgustingly simple to expose pretty much anything as AJAX calls
"Whilst the definition of open source is broad, the round-up is quite helpful."
Hemos appears to have misspelt "incorrect" as "broad".
Argh.
Using Atlas for asp.net (http://atlas.asp.net/). Fantastic framework; unbelievably simple.
I took a normal asp.net form I built for an ordering-page (lot's of postbacks for updating various basket options, etc, etc), wrapped it in an atlas XML container (all of 10 seconds work), and Bob became my uncle - the entire thing was AJAX enabled, doing lightweight postbacks & updates instead instead of the usual full-page postbacks you normally get with asp.net page-events.
And all the JS is cross-platform too - IE, FF, Safari, etc (allthough, sadly, no Opera support just yet).
And the best thing is, for all you JavaScript haters is turning off JS in the browser just meant the page automatically reverted to full-blown postbacks instead; thus not limiting accesibility.
Oh, and I understand you can link php into Atlas too, but I'm guessing there's other stuff out there for php aswell.
throw new NoSignatureException();
http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascript-librar y
--
Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.
I just went through and evaluated most of these myself in the past week because of a new work project. Dojo is by far the best when looking at building a real web "application". The others have limitations (such as Google's toolkit which requires you to write your code in Java) or are focused too much on "flashy" stuff. Dojo provides dialog boxes, windows, an editor, and more. It still has bugs and is an early version, so you need to consider your audience and time frame. For example, I had a problem with FF 1.0.7 (even though they say it is supported) but I only need to support FF 1.5 and Safari 2. I'm building a complex web app for an internal audience and I can guarantee they'll have one of these 2 browsers. Still, it seems to have broader support than some of the others toolkits. While I'm jsut starting with it, I've been happy so far. There's little documentation but the examples are good enough to get you started.
Personally I think the Yahoo YUI Toolkit is the best framework out there. It is commented very well, it is 100% cross browser compatible (they test on Opera, Firefox, Netscape, IE etc). It is fully supported by a team of engineers. They provide several versions of each script, so you can build your site with the -debug script, move to the normal script, and then when putting it on a live server, you include the minimzed script which is much smaller.