Monday, January 21, 2008

JavaScript frameworks part II

Hmm.

It would appear, that YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) is the "best" of the bunch, if a certain guarantee of cross-browser friendliness wishes to be achieved. Testing on FF 2.0, IE 7, Opera 9.25 and WebKit (on Nokia N95) - only YUI seems to work properly on all.

OK, so maybe there's a chance I introduced some CSS/JS bug somewhere, but my experience is YUI works better (than Prototype or Dojo) in most cases. I just wish it had Prototype's $() function.

OK - back to playing with Spring and Apache Derby,

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Spring, JavaScript toolkits

Went to the Spring Exchange 2008 which was great. I learned a lot more about Spring 2.5 and whats coming up in 3.0. I finally realised that Annotations might be a good idea (and can't wait to try them in the new improved Spring MVC c. 2.5.3). I also learned more about OSGi (through a talk on "Spring Dynamic Modules for OSGi") than I had before - very interesting and cool technology.

I'm happy for the Spring folks that Spring Source looks like like it has a great future. But what will happen to Java EE (previously called J2EE)? Will it wither and die to be replaced by elegant, simple POJO-based apps? And what will happen to the leading vendors? BEA/Oracle, Sun's Glassfish/SJSAS, IBM's Web's Fear, and Red Hat's JBoss? Certainly Oracle, Sun and IBM can handle the pain, but Red Hat? Hmm.

Changing subject...

I've piddled with Prototype which is really easy (mainly thanks to the $() function) and YUI which has great documentation, but started using Dojo as it's going to be included in a tag-library for Spring Web Flow 2.0.x (at some point). It's also a strong contender and like YUI doesn't need hosting at your own site. (YUI can be called directly from Yahoo!'s servers, and Dojo from AOL's CDN).

So much choice!