We recently had two workshops on AJAX and in the second one my co-host presented some JavaScript frameworks and we got into a discussion about when we’ll start using one of them. It seems that it was not a question of if but of when. I should point out that both of us are proficient in JavaScript and are not the primary targets of frameworks.
A few days later Eric posted Flummoxed by frameworks that started a huge debate about it (he also posted a later explanation). Yesterday I was also listening to Dustin’s episode 12: YUI Library Discussion about the Yahoo! User Interface Library.
What I got from all this was a weird feeling about frameworks. I can’t decide whether I like them or not and why. I don’t especially like any single one of them. Like any other advanced developer I have my own bunch of methods/functions/objects that I regularly use and copy around. This code evolves automatically as I find bugs or need more features. Frameworks on the other hand do this with a plan. Or so it seems. Hopefully the developers behind them are strong enough to fight the feature requests coming from noobs to keep the core frameworks small, simple and above all understandable. Even though some say bandwidth is almost free nowadays.
After a whole day of pondering I think I like the idea but probably not the hype and the implementations that more than anything frustrate me. I’m off to write my own framework.
Well, I for one can’t wait to see it.
I hope you gained something valuable out of that last episode. There were quite a few things I forgot to bring up to Matt while I had him in the studio.
As for whom frameworks are targeted at? I suppose they are for newbs in a sense, but on the other hand, that’s for whom they are also most dangerous. So in one sense, I would almost say they get developed for the professionals who know how to use them well.
Speaking on behalf of the YUI stuff, we are purposely refraining from calling them a framework – but rather utilities. Also keep in mind no utility is bigger than 2.5k which is amazingly small. I typically like to use the DOM Collection and Event utilities before going into any kind of development since that’s about 4k of code that does a ton of cross-browser heavy lifting for me that I don’t want to have to think about anymore. Not that I need any of these utils, It just pretty much eliminates my common.js at this point.
Frameworks in general serve a good purpose when you look at them pragmatically. So it’s probably safe to say that we can leave it at that. I think I’ve talked about them in far too many other places.
Fresh Logic Studios Scripts is an object oriented JavaScript framework with a programming model similar to the Microsoft .NET Framework.
We created this to help save us some time in developing our own products and didn’t feel it was fair to keep this work all to ourselves. Inside you’ll find JavaScript implementations for a small subset of the classes provided by the .NET Framework base class libraries.
Fresh Logic Studios Scripts is lightweight, weighing in just over 10KB. Download the library, view examples and documentation @ http://scripts.freshlogicstudios.com/
Shawn this is exactly what I don’t like – Javascript frameworks tailored after another language, even though I understand the economic reasons to do it. How would you feel if somebody wanted you to be someone else?