Ext 2.0 - jQuery 1.2.1+UI - Yahoo UI and else: What are your experiences?

- What do YOU use JS-libraries for?

- Which is the best to begin with (having non-programmers in mind)?

- Which has the best results (in terms of effects and performance)

Please share your 2cents on best practices and tough experiences!
Alex

I’d say that for non-programmers with some CSS experience, jQuery is pretty tough to beat. Mootools is very much more appropriate for developers who like to extend things. I also think jQuery’s recent code is pretty fast and very easy from an effects perspective.

MODx currently includes Mootools in it’s most recent release. 097 will be using ExtJS to take advantage of their interface widgets and libraries. I believe ExtJS has a bit steeper learning curve than jQuery and Mootools ... no experience with YUI, but I understand it is a bit harder to extend and customize to meet your purposes.

From a performance perspective, I’d expect a contant leapfrog between the various projects. Functional, too, for that matter.

Being a non-programmer, I’ll second what Ryan says : jQuery is the way to go !

I had started using script.aculo.us, then mootools but the first is heavy and not well optimized and the second has a geeky documentation and a sometimes "rough" community (at least to beginners ).

jQuery is fast, lots of plugins, well documented and its community is way more designer-oriented : just what I need
This being said, I hear a lot of good things about extJS and YahooUI, I’ll sure check those out but so far, jQuery satisfies 100% of my needs...

Thanks for your thoughts, folks!
The jQuery documentation in fact looks very detailed and not as developer orientated as others. That would be the most important thing to me. And given your experience I will definitely try this first. I had also looked at MooTools before, and found this nice introduction: http://beautyindesign.com/tutorial/increasing_user_experience_with_javascript.php, but it seems that some parts of it are deprecated and I have my difficulties with the mootorial.

YUI on the other hand seemed promising to me, not only because of the condensed documentation, but also because it seems to have good solutions for image loading and user management - and of course there`s plenty of videos to check out. Does anybody have experience with this?

Some of the other UIs however seem to be very focused on company needs like collective working with sortable tables and other stuff.

What is your favorite use for the libraries, and does it give your sites a competitive edge over others or do you think it is not really worth the effort?
Greets, Alex

JQuery is my JS library of choice, I get really suprised that it is not as popular as some of the others. I have always been a JS idiot and most other libraries intimidated me until I started to poke around JQuery. I was amazed that I was able to achieve some seemingly sophisticated stuff within minutes of downloading...much like my modx experience.

I used to subscribe to the mailing list and they are were very friendly, I unsubscribed since it was overflowing my inbox. There are a few dedicated jquery blogs around that are great resources.

What is your favorite use for the libraries, and does it give your sites a competitive edge over others or do you think it is not really worth the effort?

My favorite use is to enhance the user experience, my most common use is for collapsing windows (div p li). I will be using some ajax tabs in a current project. However I avoid over using any JS on my sites due to accessibility issues that may arise.

Thanks for sharing your experience!
Looks like jQuery really beats them all and there`s no way around it! Although there is a tough competition going on and each library seems to have an edge in some aspect - I especially like the image menu from phatfusions MooTools implementation, YUIs experimental image loader (blocking the load of images beneath the fold until scroll), and all the shiny new Ext 2.0 samples - but I guess Ryan is right in that there is a constant leapfrog between the libraries in terms of functionality (and performance).

Accessibility might also be an issue and a reminder not to overdue it. Although I stopped blocking JS long ago and don`t think many people still do so (I only use FlashBlock in FF) I wonder why some Yahoo pages are so slow (I usually don’t have the patience to wait, before I can scroll a page down with the touchpad), in spite of making use of Steve Sounders rules for high performance web sites.