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Open Source AJAX toolkits

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the AJAX-al-icious dept.

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:
  1. Dojo
  2. Google Web Toolkit
  3. Microsoft Atlas
  4. Open Rico and Prototype
  5. Yahoo AJAX Library
  6. Zimbra Kabuki AJAX Toolkit


Whilst the definition of open source is broad, the round-up is quite helpful.

4 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Erm... by savala · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If you want to add AJAX to the magic collection of buzzwords supported by your Web site (and who can resist the siren call of the latest buzzword?), then you have two major options: purchase a proprietary package or experiment with open source libraries.

    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.)

    1. Re:Erm... by slindseyusa · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I used to agree with this, until I spent some more time looking into it. Certainly XMLHttpRequest is the most powerful aspect of Ajax and it is easy to use. But Ajax generally comprises much more than that. The Dynamic HTML part can get quite confusing, especially across browsers. Look at the examples of what some of these projects can do. They are certainly big and sometimes bloated. I'm still struggling with that part as well, but I don't have the time to figure out all the details when a toolkit can handle that for me. It's no different than using a high level language and libraries, or should I write all my code in Assembly?

  2. A better review (w/ actual code samples) by jbellis · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.sitepoint.com/article/javascript-librar y

    --
    Carnage Blender : Meet interesting people. Kill them.

  3. Just did this myself by slindseyusa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.