JQuery kicking Prototype’s ass
A lot of people are very excited about jQuery. I hear a lot of, “jQuery has concise code, jQuery has less iteration, jQuery has a rock star on their website. A rock star!” I’ve always been kind of skeptical, though, since a few of the things people love about jQuery are actually in Prototype now, such as the ability to directly manipulate and chain some uses of $(), as well as the $$() function for returning items based on arbitrary CSS selectors.
With all these people talking about how sweet JQuery is, though, I wondered if it was on track to replace Prototype as the #1 JS framework. Well, according to Google Trends, interest in JQuery is blowing away interest in Prototype. What’s more notable is that these numbers include other uses of the word “prototype”! Very impressive. Next time I have a choice of JS frameworks, I’ll give it a run for its money.
Oct 6 2008
2:32 pm
I think a lot of the recent interest in jquery can be attributed to microsoft anoucing jquery will be in .Net 3.5. This has dropped it into the lap of all the windows stack developers.
Oct 6 2008
6:14 pm
That’s quite possible, and good news for the framework. More people using it means more testing coverage, more documentation, and so on. More striking to me is how inspiring people seem to find it. People using JQuery seem to be motivated to do awesome things, which is a great metric in my opinion.
Oct 8 2008
2:08 pm
jQuery is a toolkit that certainly deserves the love, IMO. Finally, a tasteful and mostly declarative approach with tremendous expressive power. The jQuery developers have done amazing work distilling the core to be very small and fast too. (as far as Javascript goes). Plugins are not difficult to create or integrate and I think that this is where enough development time and good taste will really make jQuery shine. Some plugins are already very useful, but currently there is great room for overall improvement in this area, I’m finding.
Oct 9 2008
10:44 pm
Thanks for the opinion, Jon. The plugins element is something that I’m excited to try out. If it’s as smooth as WordPress’ plugin system, it could make a big positive impact on my JS code.
Oct 11 2008
9:48 am
I’ve switched to jQuery in the last few months for a few simple reasons: it’s smaller and easily available in compiled form, it doesn’t try (and fail in IE) to extend the DOM, its APIs are simpler, it supports xpath properly, and it’s updated far more frequently (AJAX timeouts are handled properly, for example).
jQuery’s user community is spotty, however, which is what turned me off about it months ago. Most of the plugins and tutorials I’ve seen are horrid, in the VB or C# sort of way. Lots of people using it, but a huge lack of cluestick.
I was sad that prototype.js didn’t mature as I had hoped, but I think that they’re approach might be too much on the side of idealistic. A neat idea to extend the DOM, but it’s not clear that the gain outweighs the technical challenge. It feels like LISP, though, which is probably why I gravitated toward it at first.
Oct 11 2008
7:04 pm
The trying to extend the DOM and failing in IE thing is a big problem with Prototype. I know of somebody trying to build a an app with Prototype that dealt with large volumes of data and he says it was just unworkable in IE.