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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: Lost in JS Framework and RIA Options
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Every now and then i am thinking about creating a complete new UI for our logistics products NETVERSYS. But again and again i am lost in the options. Lets see where i come from:
As a result of this quite old approach, we dont have that much web 2.0 experience yet. The GUI looks pretty descent from a visually standpoint, but technically its outdated!
Ok, i checked the options. I first started to think about using YUI for the project. I used YUI 2.x for a different project and was quite satisfieing using it. They have killer grids but they completely suck when it comes to forms and validation. I really need support for that and i dont want to write it myself. And they are in the transition phase to YUI3 and it would feel bad to start with 2.x now. But 3.x has nearly no widgets and you need to use a YUI3-YUI2 Bridge to use YUI2 widgets.
Then i checked the other usual JS framework suspects like Dojo. Kill me but IMO Dojo cant compete with YUI when it comes to widgets. Their online documentation is also a complete desaster compared to YUI. I cant see too many reason to learn another framework just to have shortcommings as well. But compared to YUI, they have a forms framework, including validation.
Then i stopped at GWT. The core framework has very few widgets and it looks incomplete. I could live with the 100% java code approach - in fact i like it because as a java developer, javascript feels like coding with only one arm. No matter how often i code in JS. Since GWT is not enough, i checked add-ob libs libs like GXT and SmartGWT. With one of these, GWT seems like the ultimate killer RIA framework. But when you start with those, you are straight into the non-standard-nearly-closed-source world.
And then you start thinking about the "how much i want to be in corporate SDK business". A few months ago i played with Flex and i got the same feeling of locked into a big vendor and it doesnt felt so good. Apart from that, i somehow didnt like how Flex reported errors and its general behavior when writing some simple test apps.
Really interessting is that a lot of forum entries and blogs talk about JQuery and prototype in the same sentence. IMO these are complete different animals. I am looking for a feature rich component framework for creating business apps. JQuery gets me nowhere in this regard. They are really helpfull JS libraries, but thats it.
While researching more and more, its getting tougher and tougher to make a decission at all. Currently i have a slight preference to go with YUI3 because of my YUI2 skillset (even i know thats quite useless with YUI3 ;-)) and because it worked pretty well with a former project. I only need to cover the Forms and Validation issue with a different framework. Perhaps i can mix YUI3 with Dojo. Dojo can do the forms part then.
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