Choosing the best AJAX library

YUI, JQuery, Prototype/Scriptaculous, Dojo, Rico

[cabbagehead]

I'm trying to determine the best AJAX library for a major client of mine. So far I've evaluated the following five and I'm listing them in order of my preference:

1. Yahoo UI (YUI)
2. JQuery
3. Prototype/Scriptaculous
4. Dojo (yuck)
5. Rico (yuck)

...I know many people are using the Prototype/Scriptaculous set but in all honesty I just don't feel its as strong as YUI or JQuery. YUI is an excellent holistic solution with fantastic documentation and corporate backing. JQuery on the otherhand has a very simple and clean interface, excellent XML support (YUI is quite lacking in this area - focuses mostly on JSON).

Overall, I think YUI is looking the best, assuming minimal XML support is required and that we can standardize around JSON. Still, I've heard several high recommendations made for Jquery lately from developers I respect.

All said, can anyone lend some advice or perspective? I just want to make sure we're going with the best choice.

[Fotiman]

My personal preference is YUI. It has a great foundation from which you can do almost anything. I find JQuery to be nice for smaller, non-corporate sites. Just my 2 cents.

[cabbagehead]

Yeah - I'm frankly in love with the resources Yahoo has put together; the docs are amazing. They're also very solid in their description of browser support etc, which is huge for reliability and predictability.

The only thing I don't love is having to type YAHOO.* before everything. I suppose its pretty easy to write a wrapper for that however. :)

JQuery seems cool but a lot less centrally controlled and all the plugins feel much more "open source" and ad hoc to me. Who knows who built which plugins in their garage and all the browser support issues they bring along with them. You could spend a lot of time in QA figuring out which plugins work where, etc I would imagine?

[cabbagehead]

Do you know if YUI has decent XML support? I found there is an XMLParse method in teh DataSource lib but the docs on that seem a bit skimpy ... and I'm starting to think XML support for YUI is skimpy in general - more of a JSON centric library. Is there any truth to this or am I perhaps missing something?

[Fotiman]

.

[edited by: Fotiman at 4:02 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2007]

[httpwebwitch]

I've been using Mootools for a while and I like it.

[Demaestro]

I have used Spry and YUI

YUI is really really good... support has been prompt and new updates are regularly made.

Also YUI will host the .js files which is nice of them.

It might have the most built in features at this point but I haven't used others enough to say that with confidence.

It is a big library though.... oh also lots of cross platform browser behavior built in.

[mehh]

I custom made my AJAX library. I have a phobia like dread of using other peoples code