Have Ajax? Some issues with javascript libraries
Strange thing is that often when you see something strange that other people hype about you will think that you might not understand it well. Doing Ajax and visual effects on the sites have come a long way from time when google maps essentially brought focus to whole concept (it was used before by Microsoft in Hotmail however no-one really wanted to notice it).
I recently went on to refresh my knowledge of main javascript libraries that are used, Prototype, Moo and JQuery. While working I discovered that I don’t really like too much to use Moo, Prototype is default in Rails so I didn’t give it much thought, but I really liked JQuery now when I think about it. It is really neat and light. While there are a lot of similarities and overlap, JQuery for now is my favorite and I really enjoy using it.
I was really thrilled to learn that JQuery can work nicely with Rails and then went on to read criticism of using Prototype in web projects. It makes a lot of sense as it brings quite an overhead and when people are using it indiscriminately no wander people complain. From user perspective that overhead is loaded just initially but it can be taxing on the server and bandwidth.