I’m a big fan of Javascript frameworks that help me get things done, I’m a huge fan of anything that helps me get things done easier. My favourite framework though is jQuery after having tried a few just over a year ago I settled on jQuery as a better choice than Prototype and thankfully I’ve been proven right.
John Resig, the creator of jQuery is also a bit of a proponent for another framework called MochiKit. The idea of MochiKit is to “Make Javascript Suck Less” and as such doesn’t really offer many out there features that others might, it more concentrates on filling in functionality gaps that are present in the Javascript language.
These things include better comparator functions, which enable sorting and so on, also there are handy formatting functions, asynchronous functions and data functions for handling JSON. DOM manipulation looks to be very good, though whether it’s easier than jQuery is probably up to personal choice. Basically MochiKit seems to fill in the gaps of Javascript and do exactly what it says it does, make programming with Javascript suck less by giving you the functions you always wished you had.
I plan on checking this out and feel like it’s probably a worth addition to anybodys’ toolbox that is writing client side code.
When I started writing web applications I spent the vast majority of my time writing server side presentation code. As I progressed and people found out I knew a little bit about databases I shifted towards spending most of my time between designing and implementing data code and server side presentation code.
Now I would say I spend the majority of my time between writing server and client side presentation code, in other words I write a lot more time writing Javascript now than I ever have before and things don’t look like changing.
The majority of my work is with jQuery, but we have projects deployed using standard Javascript and Prototype as well so it pays to have as good an understanding of Javascript as possible. With that in mind I found a great site aimed at teaching some advanced uses of the language. It was written by John Resig who is one of the real leaders in using Javascript in interesting ways, he’s well known for developing the jQuery library but also has his finger in other pies most notable of which is probalby Firebug.
I remember when I started writing web applications that Javascript was almost laughed at, but now I absolutely enjoy writing it and is a massively important player on the web. I think people stopped expecting the user interaction of a web application to naturally lack that of a desktop application a little while ago and Javascript and frameworks like jQuery and Prototype allowed that to happen.