Thread

Im looking to learn one of these, but I want to pick the right one, is there any decision by Rick and co. on which framework they are going to integrate into EE 2.0?

jquery

Good catch Vangroovy! I forgot about that one.

jQuery all the way.

That is my *personal* choice - there is no feature list or ETA on 2.0.  *wanders off*

Count me as number three request for jay-query as well, wink!

Thanks Lisa,

No worries, I’m not looking for any EE 2.0 timeframe info, believe me, i’ve got a handful with EE 1.6. I just don’t wanna waste my time learning something when EE will use another. All I ask is that if you guys are looking to complement any “Future technologies” with a JS library and settle on one of the many, please share which one it will be asap so we can be ready for it. I’m sure I’m not the only EE user who is looking at learning this stuff.

Count me in for another vote on jQuery.  Nice and easy, very powerful. Can’t beat the file size, either.  😊

Now if I can only find a “migrate from mootools to jquery how-to” somewhere, I’d be very happy.

jQuery, and for widgets, ExtJs with the jQuery adapter.

Hmmm while I am just learning all this stuff I have to say jquery

Adobe Spry, as it ships with Dreamweaver which also incorporates pre built Spry widgets it will most likely become the standard so make sense surely to go that route, but why do you need to incorporate any, they are easy enough to integrate into EE front end?

My take would be let the end users decide which they want to use and keep EE as clean as possible. I for one would not be happy being forced down a particular line against my personal preferences and knowledge.

Adobe Spry, as it ships with Dreamweaver which also incorporates pre built Spry widgets it will most likely become the standard so make sense surely to go that route…

I’m not sure I agree with that.  Not everyone uses or even likes Dreamweaver, so to consider anything that comes stock with it potential for the new standard is a bit of a stretch.  Just my opinion, though. 😊

“Not everyone uses or even likes Dreamweaver” not as individuals maybe but it is the standard in design studios and has been for many years.

Adobe Spry, as it ships with Dreamweaver which also incorporates pre built Spry widgets it will most likely become the standard ...

That’s a pretty bold call.

Not really, nearly every graphic design student seems to have a hooky copy of CS2 or 3 and that has been the case for as long as I have been in the industry. Web design studios expect a degree of DW knowledge in new recruits even if it is just using design view and sliced graphics from photoshop.

Most “designers” run a mile from coding by hand and DW’s ability to drag and drop pre made widgets in design view is going to mean we see a rash of overused effects appearing from the same type of “designers” who thought 3D jagged spinning logos were cool. Expect IMHO to Ajax effects end up with the same bad press as cliched whizzy effects in Flash.

We took the decision to opt for Spry as a studio
1) because of the Adobe name and marketing power
2) the support and documentation is a league above scriptaculous
3) Adobe has the muscle and money to make sure it sees off the competition.
4) It is a full featured library not reliant on good will to keep the support and development going which as a commercial operation is important to us.

Yes of course there will always be competing products some may well be better but better rarely becomes the choice of the masses (Appe-Micro$oft as just one example). As I said leave EE clean let the end user make the choice, because if they are technical enough to know there is a choice and asses the differences, chances are they are technical enough to implement their own preference into the EE front end.

I doubt that Spry will become the single or prevalent standard, even for Adobe. Here’s why:

Adobe recently released ColdFusion 8 public beta, which is feature complete, stable, and which the website Adobe.com itself is now running on.  ColdFusion 8 has adopted YUI and ExtJs with the YUI Adaptor. Adobe have added ColdFusion tags on top of ExtJs which wraps the underlying complexity, just requiring the developer to provide a simple set of attributes much the same way EE’s tags hide the complexity of the underlying code.

Adobe has not abandoned Spry, but they needed an underlying system that had a rich set of User Interface widgets, and Spry does not have that, and is very unlikely to catch up. In a way this is saddening, because I think Spry has the most elegant data provider model of the bunch.

It’s not certain that Adobe will ship the final version with the YUI adapter - with ExtJs you can swap out the underlying adaptor with jQuery, prototype, ExtJs native, and others are in the works.  But it is virtually certain with Adobe will ship ColdFusion 8 with ExtJs.

I don’t believe this means that ExtJs will become THE one and only standard for Adobe, as they have their toes in many areas, including Flex.  And ColdFusion is a developer tool, not a design tool. But I think it is evidence that there will not be a single standard, even for Adobe, or even for an Adobe design tool such as Dreamweaver.  Dreamweaver supports ColdFusion as well as PHP, which means Adobe will have to extend Dreamweaver to recognize the new ExtJs tags.

Having said that, I would tread carefully with any Web2 library, especially the widgets, as they tend to be heavy weight. 

jQuery is relatively lightweight, and you can add ExtJs widgets on top of it if you need to. 

The landscape is constantly changing, and will not settle out for some time.  All these systems are ugly under the covers because of the necessity of facilitating multiple versions of multiple browsers.  And the ones that provide nice widgets, such as ExtJs, Dojo, BackBase, and SmartClient, place heavy demands on browsers that current versions of the browsers can barely accommodate.

69-Design:  I think there is wisdom in your suggestion that EE be left “clean”, as the whole landscape is so volatile now.  This is especially true, in my opinion, with the default template sets, although alternative template sets using any library could be provided by EE or third parties.  The CP is a different issue, as it could benefit more from a Web2 library.  But that’s a whole different discussion ….

If you’re interested, you can see the ExtJs examples and demos at http://extjs.com/deploy/ext/docs/index.html.  If you’re just dipping your toes into this arena, I would recommend starting with something lighter like jQuery, mootools, prototype, or Spry. 

As anyone who has started down this road knows, the world of Web2 software development is both ugly and promising, both compelling and cautioning, and both exciting and frustrating to work with.