javascript/widget toolkits

[sourceninja]

It's that time of year again. I'm about to start a HUGE project, and I'm trying to evaluate the current state of javascript frameworks to see if there might be a better option then my old standby of jquery.

So far I've identified the following:
http://qooxdoo.org/ - nice widgets, demo site is SLOW, looks robust... Some of their demo pages didn't work.

http://www.dojotoolkit.org/ - was slow in the past, but has been redesigned and is popular. Some of their demo pages didn't work.

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/ - The video's I've seen on YUI3 look simply great. It's modular, expandable, and can use YUI2 for any missing widgets. YUI3 only loads the modules you require, keeping it very small and fast.

Finally http://code.google.com/closure/ - more then just a framework, it has a template engine, compiler, optimiser, etc. A huge library of like 150 megs and a compiler that strips it down to just what you require and combines all your javascript into a single file. Looks very robust, but it's fairly new and there is not a lot of help to be found out there.

I'm leaning towards moving to YUI3 + some YUI2 (like the datatable), but google closure and dojo and still right there in my mind as viable options. Anyone have any experience with these frameworks?

 

[clamum]

Sorry, probably not much help from myself. I've heard good things about YUI but haven't kept up on it at all since I first checked it out. The other frameworks I have not read about, except for jQuery, which I like more and more the more I use it. Sorry I ain't much help, just had to give a shoutout for jQuery, haha. I think I'll take a look at the other frameworks you've posted though, thanks, could definitely come in handy at work.

 

[Spad3S]

Why not use something like Google Web Toolkit and some of the add on libraries for it? Pretty simple to use and provides nice cross browser compatibility for free.

 

[MrChad]

Our company went with Ext.

 

[sourceninja]

Why not use something like Google Web Toolkit and some of the add on libraries for it? Pretty simple to use and provides nice cross browser compatibility for free.

I'm not a java developer. I've used java in the past, but I'd rather work in languages I use every single day. But otherwise, I'd consider it.