comparing open-source ajax frameworks
I was writing up some notes for my next guest spot on the Lab with Leo next week (which will appropriately be about comparing and contrasting AJAX frameworks) when I realized that I probably shouldn’t let all this research and paraphrasing work that I’ve put together go to waste. Most of it won’t make it on air, I’m sure, but it seems useful to make it available here in case anyone is curious. This also just happens to be relevant to (and also completely unrelated to) Brian LeRoux’s Vancouver AJAX & Beer meetup which is happening tonight over at the Irish Heather (and which I will be most enthusiastically attending as soon as I post this article.)
What my (non-scientific) research ended up becoming is basically a modified SWOT analysis. I did quite a bit of digging on the pros and cons of various AJAX frameworks that I didn’t have much experience with (most of my work has been with the YUI and script.aculo.us), such as MooTools, ext.js and Dojo. Not to mention the more highly-coupled frameworks out there like ASP.NET AJAX and the Google Web Tookit. During said digging, I failed to come across much in terms of recent comparisons between frameworks, so it seemed like a good idea to post up the rather high-level view of the different popular frameworks available that I’ve put together. Doesn’t hurt to let people comment if I’ve mucked something up or missed anything important, too.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Steve Calvert (or nu-steve, as we like to refer to him here) at OpenRoad for his insight into working with MooTools, which I had very little knowledge of.


After spending the last few months hacking away at the 

