Open Source AJAX toolkits 147
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:
- 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.
"Open source?" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to Rico (Score:2, Insightful)
Looking over the packages listed here, I'm especially impressed with Rico. Single file used in conjunction with the prototype.js script. And a really excellent demo page:
http://openrico.org/rico/demos.page?demo=rico_eff
The author of the article gives Yahoo credit for the package management -- I think Rico deserves a praise for their site, too. I look forward to giving it a whirl.
Re:script.aculo.us? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anti-disclaimer: I don't have anything to do with the script.aculo.us guys, but as a Ruby on Rails developer it has served my needs just fine.
Re:Erm... (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the usefulness of these toolkits, weighing in at 53k (considerably less if you were to use any of the js compacting methods available out there), I find prototype to be an enormous time-saver, and the code saved in my applications goes a great distance toward offsetting the one-time 53k download for users of my websites.
Look, if I took your logic, the next time I wrote an OS X app, I'd write it from scratch in C, without the benefit of the Mac frameworks, and cut and paste from "my own personal library." And I'd probably want to compile it by hand too -- God knows what kind of code the compiler is actually generating, right?
There is a tremendous advantage to abstraction and generalization -- indeed, we'd still be coding ones and zeros if we didn't have it. Sure, you can take it too far too fast, but as one who has done a lot of coding with javascript since not long after its inception, I can tell you that unless you're not doing anything much more complicated than rollovers, it's time to move up. Whether you want to do that with community code or your personal collection is up to you, but I'd like to have a little free time at the end of the day.
Documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
This stuff is really exciting, but until there is documentation, it is not worth mentioning at work.
Re:Documentation (Score:3, Insightful)
Dojo's [dojotoolkit.org] docs [jot.com] are very much hit-or-miss. Some features are pretty smoothly documented. Others are like navigating a trackless wilderness with no more than the sun and stars to guide you. Also, Dojo's annoying because it requires you to add non-standard attributes to your HTML in order to identify widgets. For example: dojoType? widgetId? Those ain't gonna pass no validator THIS little programmer knows of.
Re:Erm... (Score:4, Insightful)
It depends what you are using it for. For a complex DHTML interface for a web application that people use on a regular basis, sure, ~50KB isn't a big deal, especially when it's usually going to be coming from their cache. But for an average website that just wants to enhance particular aspects of their interface, it's ludicrous to make visitors download all that JavaScript, most of which will remain unused.
The Digg example LiquidCoooled posted is a good one. The Digg developers seem to have paid no attention to efficiency, they just dump everything they might ever possibly use onto every page regardless of whether they use one function or twenty. For instance, they reference a 36KB drag and drop library on every page on their site, but I don't see them actually using any drag and drop anywhere - do you? Or how about the fact that they reference aboutdigg.js on every page despite the fact that the code is only ever used on one specific page which most visitors aren't ever going to visit anyway?
Sure, there are a lot of instances where it's a good idea to use a library. But I think a lot of the people using libraries like this are doing so because they want to cut corners, not because it's the right tool for the job.
Re:Nice, printer format... (Score:3, Insightful)
Was my post worth +5? Probably not, but obviously, enough appreciated it enough to mod it up....