In recent years, the jQuery open source library and framework has gained greater attention among a slate of frameworks that includes Dojo, Prototype, GWT and others.

Evidence including results of this year's TSS reader survey show a big move by jQuery - but what does that mean? Some bits from a SearchSOA.com story:

jQuery proponent Ralph Whitbeck said, "There is plenty of room [in the Ajax market] for multiple libraries."

Other participants in the Ajax framework world agree.

"I don't really think jQuery is pulling a lot of people away from other frameworks, but rather growing the market," said Aaron Newton, an Ajax developer and major proponent of MooTools.

Meanwhile Dojo proponent Dylan Schiemann explained that, "For larger enterprises, there's no single framework. Each team uses what's best for them. The applications might be built with Clojure or Dojo, and the homepage might be built with jQuery."

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid26_gci1521947,00.html

What do you think?

I miss ExtJS mention in Ajax frameworks

I miss ExtJS mention in Ajax frameworks

Is that all you took away from that article? That it didn't mention ExtJS? It did say "...and others".

Anyway, OT - good article. Being fluent mostly in Prototype and jQuery, I agree it's not a matter of one or the other, more a box full of tools and you are free to pick which one fits the situation, especially as the different frameworks get better and better at playing nicely together. In my experience, jQuery is stronger and has wider support for visual operations (effects etc) while Prototype has more language-level features (currying, Class creation/inheritance). In between it's pretty much even. And I'm excited about Prototype's move to the Sizzle engine in the new version as that seem to have established itself as the fastest and most efficient selector engine (jQuery has been using it since forever).

The thing I'm most concerned about is how more and more server-side frameworks create strong ties with one javascript-framework or another to drive things like ajax-components. I realize it's hard to get around. After all, you need SOME javascript infrastructure to create AJAX components. But it's ripe for conflicts and can sometimes be limiting to front-end/web-developers.

"The programming frameworks like Dojo and Prototype may tend more toward application developers – many of them Java developers – who want a broad toolset that provides functionality for complex programming, while jQuery leans toward use among Web page builders."

I actually believe the opposite is true.
Most Java developers tend to favour Java based Web frameworks. Libraries like jQuery which allow them to do so and add some simple Ajax spice would be preferred.

Dojo shines if you want to create a full blown Ajax application, e.g. a thick JS client application.
Most Java developers in my experience shy away from poper JS development with closures and dynamic typing being the most scary parts ...

Most Java developers in my experience shy away from poper JS development with closures and dynamic typing being the most scary parts ...

Make your developers aware of GWT and the issue solved.

P.S. don't forget GWT is not a framework. =)

The best of all is VAADIN

This is my point. Java developers prefer to stay in their language (of choice). They tend to prefer the intermediate step introduced by GWT rather than get their hands dirty having to write JS.
A bit of jQuery for some effects may be ok - but that's it.
Frameworks like Dojo allow you to use the whole power of javascript (and it has some - closures, prototypes and the dynanism of js are powerfull!) in a component based, server language independent manner.
But you have to get out of your (java) comfort zone ...

I would go for gwtQuery. JQuery in Gwt, that even is able to perform faster then JQuery due to the GWT  compiler optimizations.
See: http://code.google.com/p/gwtquery/

I personally try to stay away from javascript development due to the easy creation of memory leaks,  a lot of ajax-javascript app's have these days.

As someone who appreciates elegance in frameworks, I like working with YUI 3, which is powerful and versatile. It doesn't have the breadth of jquery's components available, but it's rapidly going in the right direction.

Just read Raible's reply to Frameworks - the following paragraph should have really been placed here:

Now that JSF 2.0 is out, it has Ajax integrated and allows you to use GET instead of POST-for-everything. However, the only people that like Ajax integrated into their web frameworks are programmers scared of JavaScript (who probably shouldn't be developing your UI). Also, the best component development platform for the web is JavaScript. I recommend using an Ajax framework for your components if you really want a rich UI.