Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Good Bye Prototype, Welcome jQuery

I have been a prototype.js user for almost 1 1/2 years now but for a new project, I was forced to use jquery (www.jquery.com). In the beginning, I was too reluctant to give it a shot because of the learning curve and laziness on my part, but I must say once I dived in, I was very impressed with the library, it's documentation, the community, the number of plugins and how easy it was to find all this - something that prototype lacked right from day one (okay now they do have a documentation site www.prototypejs.org, but it just doesn't compare to the jquery website at any level). In no way am I undermining the power of prototype.js (the library that fixed javascript programming :). Just that I am going to be experimenting with jquery now.

One more thing, people often shy away from libraries because of their size, but jquery offers an "official" compressed version of the library that is just 19KB. Prototype too has it's compressed versions but nothing that is official and I always had problems working with unofficial compressed versions.

What's the point of this post? Well, I wanted to write about all the flash work I have been doing, but was just not able to get in the mood to detail that out, so thought will post this for the time being ;)

-Mandy.