I made a choice: “Use different designs for different technologies”.

I will not leave prototype but I will not ignore jquery! They are two superpowers in the war of browsers. I wish they will merge as one! Eitherside you go you have a gulf fixed that you can not cross over safely!

I wish and hope that there is a way to bridge this technologies together and I desire for the making of another one that will establish the end of prototype and jquery unless they be reconciled!

Oliver Bob Lagumen

jQuery is very good at manipulating and finding stuff in the DOM. But if you need to write a framework or any logic, jQuery isn’t very useful. It has a few methods for manipulating arrays, but they don’t allow you to specify the context so they aren’t always useful.

Prototype includes a lot of enhancements to JavaScript that make writing a framework, or logic, easier. Methods added to the Function object and the Enumerable class, which is used in a lot of places in Prototype, provide very advanced mechanisms for working with groups of objects. It’s DOM manipulation functions are useful, but it’s plugin ecosystem isn’t as rich as jQuerys.

Chaining is a big source of contention, some developers hate it, others love it. i think it is useful in many circumstances but can be taken overboard. The implied iteration in jQuery is just awesome, and the consistency of not passing in a parameter to a function to invoke it and passing one in to set it makes guessing when you don’t remember something easy.

The .click, .hover, .toggle shortcuts for the bind events rock. The automatic unbinding of events that both libraries do to prevent memory leaks in ie is very cool. Even so, I had memory leaks from .bind() in Prototype that switching over to jQuery fixed.

JQuery makes better use of ‘this’ references:
$.each(array, function() {
alert(this);
});

instead of

array.each(function(a) {
alert(a);
});

I hate that prototype extends the DOM. It provides a lot of nifty functions for arrays and strings, but those should be encapsulated in a single object instead of extending the DOM. Imagine a Java library changing the way arrays work in Java. That’s crazy talk.

In my experience, jQuery requires about 30% less code to do the same thing as the equivalent code in prototype.

I’ve also played a little bit with mootools. They approach javascript a bit differently then jQuery or Prototype but they don’t do as many things as these two do. I don’t really see a point to that library, I think that people who learned with mootools or developed for it have developed an attachment to it and it really does handle 90% of the things you need so there is no compelling reason to change from mootools if that is what you know. But if you don’t know any right now, I’d say learn jQuery.

Jquery’s use of CSS3 selectors (designed for the DOM) makes it all so much simpler!

please submit your valuable opinions :D

click( ) Returns: jQuery
Triggers the click event of each matched element.
click( fn ) Returns: jQuery
Binds a function to the click event of each matched element.

The first one triggers a click, the second one adds a listener. Same names – quick but not clean.

But the reasons to use jQuery because of that are getting smaller. Using jQuery because of chaining is not a valid point anymore now that Prototype (1.6) does the same thing. Those experienced with the frameworks can write most examples in these slides even smaller. Getting both frameworks down the the same amount of code.

In the end you will want better syntax.

And slide 17: Prototype 1.5* already supports Element.observe
@Karl M
Go back leeching on articles that are actually about Mootools.
@Cal Jacobson
The user wouldn’t care either way, if webmasters would learn to gzip their content. It is my opinion as a developer however, that self explanatory code is much better than concise code with many comments.
@Colin
Once again, this is not an article about Mootools. It doesn’t even mention Mootools. But at least you were nice enough to provide constructive criticism. That being said, I personally use about 90% of the features prototypejs offers, so I wouldn’t call them useless. If you don’t, either use a smaller library, or just pick the components you want (prototype is split into many js files in svn) and use only those.
@Olmo Maldonado
Seriously, if you don’t focus on advertising, how do you explain people like Karl M? Every post on this site that mentions a js library other than Mootools always gets a couple of retards like him that always mention Mootools out of the blue. Even on entirely unrelated topics.

Prototype is a miracle as far as I am concerned. I like that it has its focus on basic JavaScript support, allowing third parties to build on top of it all the animations, UIs, etc, that they want. While Prototype can be a pain in the way it integrates with JavaScript, it might be worth it in the end. Also Prototype is one of the more solid alternatives to libraries like Ext, GWT, YUI, Dojo… Which can be much more painful to work with and “download”. :-)

Lest assured that I think jQuery has an upper hand in being easy to sell and use, which means it could well take over the leader position. Where I think jQuery fails is in appealing to the types of developers who use libraries like Ext, GWT, YUI, Dojo… Which includes me. :-)

Also, it’s my understanding that Prototype works like a solid base on which to build other libraries like Dojo, jQuery, Ext… So not all is decided yet. While the newer libraries have pushed the envelop many times and became even better than Prototype in some regards, remember the turtle’s story. :-)

Was MooTools late on the scene? Was Prototype first on the scene? Are some just better at networking/promoting and/or having more of the right contacts?

I believe the order of apperance (public release) was: Prototype, Scriptaculous, Moo.fx, jQuery, MooTools, and so on… Perhaps YUI before jQuery, but I’m not familiar.

I’m not sure how to explain the discrepancy, but MooTools doesn’t focus on advertising. We tend to focus on our code. Today might seem like an advertisement, but I was honestly just providing an opinion ;). Coincidently MooTools has worked on SlickSpeed. If anything YSlow is rather nice benchmark, but I haven’t spent a lot of time understanding what it does.

Greetings