In the recent few months I was troubled in thoughts what JavaScript library we should used, now that we are rebuilding our product web UI.
The first limitation is that we will use the corporate common UI library which uses Prototype and Scriptaculous, but some components are missing from these libraries. The common UI library author did try to improve the library by adding more components to it, but they are far from being complete.
My main other options was YUI and Dojo. I followed and liked YUI from its very beginning – it seems like a nicely designed library with a devoted community. Then I attended Alex Russell‘s presentation at the ISOC conference, and I was impressed by the Dojo design concepts he presented, namely events and widgets.
However, I recently read the Ext library by Jack Slocum was released, and that it can work against Prototype, YUI and jQuery. I knew it was started as a grid for YUI which lacked that feature but added it in the recently released 2.2.0 version, but when I took a look at Ext’s component collection, I realized it has exactly all the components we needed for our revised UI:
- a decent data grid
- a date selection (calendar) control
- a good menu component
- impressive windoids support
There is one problem with Ext – although it is released under an Open Source license (LGPL), they encourage people who use it commercially to be a license. I didn’t see similar requests on YUI and Dojo. I don’t really know how our corporate will handle this license issue, but I think that when coding time approaches, I’ll start the process of using Ext in our product. Meanwhile I’m playing with it so I can show off what it can do to our product.
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