Trying out JQuery
I’ve looked at JQuery before, but hadn’t really played around with it until recently.
I’m a prototypejs kind of guy, but jquery is so similar that it’s easy to switch.
There are a lot of small differences, but overall I would say that JQuery feels a lot like Prototype lite. That’s not necessarily a bad thing: JQuery is a lot faster to download than prototype, it’s easier to learn, and a lot of what it’s missing is too high concept or edge-case to be used in most javascript coding tasks anyways.
My major issue with Prototype is that I hate script.aculo.us. Although I haven’t used JQuery UI, it looks less powerful but faster and more consistent across browsers, which are the major issues with script.aculo.us. However you can always implement your own effects and just ignore script.aculo.us.
Overall, I would say that if you are going for a very intensive Javascript project, I would still use Prototype, especially if your project wasn’t effects intensive and you wanted to focus on robustness and maintainability of code, because JQuery offers less sophisticated abstract programming helpers.
If you are working on a project with just a small to medium amount of Javascript, or even small to start and may potentially grow, JQuery is probably the best option and seems to have the traction now. Since Prototype is closely tied to Ruby on Rails and Rails seems to have peaked in 2007 and then spent 2008 going nowhere, I would guess that 2009 will see rails and prototype lose further ground.
