Learning PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript

Choosing a Framework

The new difficulty now is choosing among the bewildering variety of frameworks. Some of the more popular of which are listed in Table 19-1.

Table 19-1. Some popular JavaScript frameworks

Framework	Web address
ASP.NET Ajax Framework	http://asp.net/ajax
Clean Ajax Framework	http://sourceforge.net/projects/clean-ajax
Dojo Toolkit	http://dojotoolkit.org
jQuery	http://jquery.com
MochiKit	http://mochikit.com
MooTools	http://mootools.net
OpenJS	http://openjs.com
Prototype	http://prototypejs.org
Rialto	http://rialto.improve-technologies.com/wiki
script.aculo.us	http://script.aculo.us
Spry Framework	http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry
YUI	http://developer.yahoo.com/yui

Because each of these frameworks works differently, I have opted to settle on just one of them—the YUI framework—for this chapter. I made this decision because it was originally written by programmers at Yahoo!, which since then has allowed the JavaScript community as a whole to contribute code to the project. As a result, it’s a solid framework used across all the Yahoo! properties and also by tens of thousands of developers around the world.

What’s more, you can download the entire framework and an extensive collection of more than 300 example programs, along with a comprehensive amount of documentation, amounting to over 70 MB of data once uncompressed. But although I say “you can,” you don’t have to, because all of these scripts and the documentation appear on the YUI developer website, and you are permitted to simply link ...