The other thing that I find is that MooTools sounds a lot more
impressive than jQuery does when you're presenting a project to a
potential client. Because jQuery is so wide-spread, and because it's
targeted, as Aaron points out, at making JavaScript widely accessible
and widely employed, a lot of people dismiss it as a layer of glitter. I
find a similar situation wrt. PHP and Java Servlets -- the more 'niche'
system appears, to the outside world, to be more impressive.
Of course, with the projects I'm currently working on (large web-apps
for the education sector), I'm 90% sure that development in jQuery would
take at least 50% longer. I don't think there'd be much difference
between MooTools and Dojo, YUI, et al.; that's the level MooTools sits
at in the framework world. In some ways, jQuery is a bit like
Processing: it makes it easy to get things happening quickly, and, if
you're willing to put in the effort, you can make it really work well.
The "higher-level" frameworks are, to continue the analogy, like plain
vanilla Java: it takes more effort to get something pretty on-screen,
but you have vast reserves of power at your disposal.
And to your challenge, Aaron: I'm working at getting some of the
components that I've developed here at work open-sourced and released on
the Forge -- hopefully, it won't be too much longer! :D
On 27/05/10 04:07, Aaron Newton wrote:
I'll chime in a little here.
First, I think what jQuery does is good for us, good for the web.
They've made JavaScript not the blocking factor to making an
interactive web experience. If you can learn html and css, and have
some design skill, you can make a web site that is interactive and
ajaxy and hotness. In general, this lowering of requirements has
changed the web. The fact that there are thousands upon thousands of
non-programmers making the web more interactive is a good thing (and
jQuery isn't the only one who gets credit here).
But we don't /want /to serve that audience. When people show up in our
forums with problems the first thing we tell them to do is make a
mooshell/jsfiddle. We don't tend to answer many questions along the
lines of "how do I use javascript in my blog?" A long, long time ago,
our forums were overrun with questions like that, and to be frank, our
community suffered for it (and still suffers the perception of being
unfriendly to newbies). We very clearly are a programmers framework,
and when people show up who don't read the docs and who don't ask teh
Google before they ask us, we tend to push back on them to show some code.
jQuery doesn't do this. Their scale is a result of that. They are
taking the raw masses and showing them that JavaScript is cool. Some
very, very small percentage of these people are going to, at some
point, grow out of jQuery and look for something more robust. Maybe
they'll find Dojo, or Prototype, or YUI, or us. But the point is that
we don't really want them before this. It's a tremendous distraction.
I don't begrudge jQuery's position in the market. The only thing I
regret, really - the only thing - is that if you are a really
talented, hardcore JS developer and would be happy using MooTools,
Prototype, YUI, or Dojo in your work, it's harder to find a job. The
nature of JS frameworks is that it's best to pick one and use it. If
you're a bad-ass MooTools developer and get a job at Digg or NetFlix
or Mozila, you're out of luck. You'll be using jQuery whether you like
it or not. This is the only real reason I wish MooTools were more popular.
I'd also like to see everyone on this thread asking themselves what
they can do to make MooTools better. Don't just gripe about it. Do the
hard stuff. Go fix some bugs. Go write a blog post. Go make a
screencast. Go create a plugin and put it in the forge. Get involved.
It's not the current devs that are going to make it grow dramatically;
we give everything we have already. It's you people that can change this.
--
Not sent from my Apple ?Phone.
