In all fairness to Prototype, I haven’t used it nearly as extensively as I have YUI, and it does provide some very nifty syntactic sugar. What’s worse, I personally know a lot of the people involved with YUI, and I’m sure that my high opinion of them as people colors my feelings about their work, even if I try my best to be unbiased.

However, I *can* say that I’ve interviewed and known with many Javascript developers who have worked with Prototype and Dojo. Take away their $, and most of them are useless. We internalize the paradigms we surround ourselves with. By comparison, I’ve also seen complete javascript novices (including a few non-yahoos) start using YUI, and by adopting the paradigms in the library, become much better javascripters.

The fundamental reason for this is obvious: YUI was created with the intent of extending the paradigms within the javascript language. Most other libraries were created with the intent of changing the paradigms of the language. You can’t learn russian by speaking french.

There comes a time in a project, hopefully as soon as possible, when you pick a framework and run with it. That decision is never fully informed, because that would make it pointless. The quality of the community and the documentation is key. In my opinion, YUI is a better library largely because it fosters a community that tends to be more knowledgeable about javascript in general, and because code that uses YUI will tend to be more understandable by anyone who knows Javascript.

Dojo’s chaining syntax is pretty and clever, but if you aren’t familiar with Dojo, it can be rather confusing. On the other hand, YUI’s structures, and the code that implements them, while a bit more wordy than Dojo, are also very clear, easy to optimize, and easy for any javascripter to understand, even if they’re not already familiar with YUI.

By the time you’re done the libraries will have evolved and the critics will say you’re using out-of-date software. Then, of course, you will have used up far more time than you have available, and a major purpose for using the library was saving time in the first place!

Rational comparison is irrationally expensive.

Fred

That works just as well, I suppose, except that the private methods can’t be accessed from within the constructor itself. On the other hand, the benefit is that, for those familiar with the javascript module pattern, it uses the module pattern to create the prototype.

Of course, they’re so cheap that when in doubt, I just create a closure to hide code within it. They you can afford to be a bit “sloppy” (creating vars willy-nilly) without fear of polluting the global space.

MyClass= function(a, b, id) {
};
MyClass.prototype = (function() {
  var privateData = “foo”;
  function privateMethod() {
  };
  return {
    publicMethod: function() {}
  };
})();

@Nate I think I just figured out a promotion technique for Foohack: write about YUI every other post, and let you promote it for me.

Thanks,
Nate