Wow, this takes me way back -- but that 'way back' was only 10 years ago. So much has changed in that span of time, it's mindboggling.
Around the time that MooTools appeared, Prototype and Dojo were the cutting-edge of DHTML, freshly made cool again by the term 'Ajax'. Prototype was very much a series of ugly hacks driven by the get-shit-done monkeypatching mentality of Rails, but it was fantastic. Meanwhile Dojo was fast-sprawling ecosystem of community and corportate contributions and plugins and whatnot, backed by a non-profit Foundation, and supported by major companies like IBM and Sun -- I can't firsthand speak to its quality (some have said it was quite good), but the contrast was night and day.
Script.aculo.us emerged built on top of Prototype to add tasteful interactivity (like DOM element dragging), and its branding targeted style-conscious developer-designers (the sort who'd read CSS Zen Garden but were tempted by JS). As the MooTools team noted, the weaknesses of Prototype started to show as its capabilities were pushed -- and it was getting kinda big. It was into this landscape that jQuery, Moo.fx, and MooTools arrived, and the rest is now ancient history.
There were many things that set jQuery and MooTools apart, but a notable one was their differring philosophies on extending native JS objects, or in contemporary parlance "extending the DOM". jQuery specifically didn't do this, while MooTools followed in the vein of Prototype and actually extended more builtins. Over time, this particular debate went from an implementation detail to a significant issue in the community -- a good example is this blog post from 2010, and its comment thread [1], to read both supporting and dissenting attitudes of the time.
I remember these early days of "mainstream Ajax" as being fairly annoying, but mostly because of browser vendors, and less so because of library authors. But today, that Ajax JS frameworks have been superseded by MV* JS frameworks, I actually find fewer substantive articles, blogs, and analyses that talk about the innards of frameworks and contrasting design decisions than I did back in those days.
Notwithstanding the issues about framework proliferation, most high-quality reviews, comparisons, and material is produced by first-parties (especially the authors of 'underdog' libraries), while very little is produced by the community. There was a LOT of cargo-culting back in 2007 too -- I know, I was one of those people -- but there's much more today. Whether this is because the most engaged people now tend to contribute to projects instead of blogging about them, or because interest in deeper analysis has declined, I'm not sure. I miss it sometimes.
Around the time that MooTools appeared, Prototype and Dojo were the cutting-edge of DHTML, freshly made cool again by the term 'Ajax'. Prototype was very much a series of ugly hacks driven by the get-shit-done monkeypatching mentality of Rails, but it was fantastic. Meanwhile Dojo was fast-sprawling ecosystem of community and corportate contributions and plugins and whatnot, backed by a non-profit Foundation, and supported by major companies like IBM and Sun -- I can't firsthand speak to its quality (some have said it was quite good), but the contrast was night and day.
Script.aculo.us emerged built on top of Prototype to add tasteful interactivity (like DOM element dragging), and its branding targeted style-conscious developer-designers (the sort who'd read CSS Zen Garden but were tempted by JS). As the MooTools team noted, the weaknesses of Prototype started to show as its capabilities were pushed -- and it was getting kinda big. It was into this landscape that jQuery, Moo.fx, and MooTools arrived, and the rest is now ancient history.
There were many things that set jQuery and MooTools apart, but a notable one was their differring philosophies on extending native JS objects, or in contemporary parlance "extending the DOM". jQuery specifically didn't do this, while MooTools followed in the vein of Prototype and actually extended more builtins. Over time, this particular debate went from an implementation detail to a significant issue in the community -- a good example is this blog post from 2010, and its comment thread [1], to read both supporting and dissenting attitudes of the time.
I remember these early days of "mainstream Ajax" as being fairly annoying, but mostly because of browser vendors, and less so because of library authors. But today, that Ajax JS frameworks have been superseded by MV* JS frameworks, I actually find fewer substantive articles, blogs, and analyses that talk about the innards of frameworks and contrasting design decisions than I did back in those days.
Notwithstanding the issues about framework proliferation, most high-quality reviews, comparisons, and material is produced by first-parties (especially the authors of 'underdog' libraries), while very little is produced by the community. There was a LOT of cargo-culting back in 2007 too -- I know, I was one of those people -- but there's much more today. Whether this is because the most engaged people now tend to contribute to projects instead of blogging about them, or because interest in deeper analysis has declined, I'm not sure. I miss it sometimes.
[1] http://perfectionkills.com/whats-wrong-with-extending-the-do...