One of the aspects of having a lot of action going on around a development space that’s rather new is that you get a lot of people solving problems just like the ones you’re having. These people release their work and you can make use of them if you like.

So you go download a few, pick the one that looks best and get started working. Meanwhile ten more solutions hit the market and you’ve already commited yourself. Stopping what you’re doing and going back has that oh-so-familiar pitfal that we’ve all experienced: you either waste a lot of time reading up and trying out those ten new things or, almost worse, discover that someone has a better solution than the one you’re half way through implementing.

I saw this post below on Ajaxian today and figured I’d read it because I’d been curious about Rico and Dojo in particular but hadn’t gotten around to trying them out. Dojo is friggin awesome. From a tech prod perspective, I think it’s the slickest thing I’ve seen yet. Implementing the various aspects of the Dojo platform seems super-duper easy, almost to the point that you don’t need to know a lot of javascript. So now I gotta go download, install, and fiddle with it for a few weeks and then probably rewrite some of my existing work. Sheesh.
In the article linked to below, you’ll find screencasts for each of the six frameworks. They aren’t terribly detailed, but the give you a decent idea of what it’s like to actually use the libraries.

In this new article from InfoWorld today, they look around the web and take stock of some of the more well-developed, strong Ajax toolkits around - six to be exact - and give an overview of them all.

If you want to add AJAX to the magic collection of buzzwords supported by your Web site (and who can resist the siren call of the latest buzzword?), then you have two major options: purchase a proprietary package or experiment with open source libraries.

InfoWorld has covered a number of excellent proprietary AJAX toolkits in the past, and now we’re turning our attention to some of their open source rivals. Are they worth exploring for enterprise use?

The six frameworks/toolkits they cover are:

  • Dojo
  • Zimbra Kabuki Ajax Toolkit
  • Google Web Toolkit
  • Open Rico and Prototype
  • Microsoft Atlas
  • Yahoo Ajax Library

They start with their reasoning behind their choices before even getting into the descriptions. They also have a reminder that these are their opinions on these toolkits, not to be taken as law - a toolkit is a personal choice.

For each of the toolkits, they talk about what it is, who makes it, how it works (all of the boring stuff) as well as their thoughts on its functionality, ease of development, and include screenshots for those more visually oriented. And, for the even more impatient in the bunch, you can skip right on down to the last page for six ‘cheat sheets’ on the different toolkits, spotlighting the points made before.