Tips & directions what to look for in a framework/lib/toolkit before making the choice.

1. choosing the right
JavaScript
Library/Framework/Toolkit
for your project

2. Presentation goals
● Give directions
● Compare few major libraries, frameworks &
toolkits
● Statistics

3. Who am I?

7. Your project?
● Type
● How big is it
● Features
● Future expectations

8. Definitions
What is library?
What is framework?
What is toolkit?

9. Library
Bits of functionality that you can call.
● jQuery

10. Framework
Universal, reusable software platform,
foundation of applications, products and
solutions.
● MooTools
● AngularJS
● BackboneJS

11. Toolkit
A set of independent libraries, designed to work
well together, that you can pick and choose
from.
● Dojo
● YUI

12. Features

13. Comparison table
● all available over CDN*
● all cross-browser**

14. Performance, Size,
Modularity

15. Selector Engine performance

16. Size
● Size does not
matter if the
resources are
distributed over
CDN
● cdnjs.com

17. Modularity
● MooTools provide configurable download
● Async Module Definition - YUI, Dojo

18. OOP, inheritance,
code reuse

19. jQuery's bad practices
The never-ending callback nesting

20. Code structure
● Classes for reusable components
● Constructor options
● Use synchronization API instead of nested
callbacks

21. Code structure
The MooTools way

22. Code structure

23. Utilities

24. Utilities
● A utility should first try to delegate to native
and if it fails, use it’s own implementation
● The more utilities, the better

25. Commonly needed utilities
● String
trim() hyphenate() camelCase() escapeRegExp()
toInt() toFloat() substitute()
● Object & Array
each() some() every() filter() contains()
map() empty() append()

26. Commonly needed utilities
● Object
values() keys() clone() merge()
toQueryString()
● Array
associate() clean() unique() flatten()

27. User Interface

28. User Interface
● Should be easy to style
(jQueryUI provides a great theme development tool)

29. User Interface
● API should provide full control
○
destroy()
○ DatePicker should be able to have its value set from
outside
○ Tabs should provide API for selecting tab
dynamically

30. MV*, or not MV*?
that is the question

31. When to use MV*
● AJAX-heavy web apps
● JSON data structure
● Need to render data in different ways on the
same page
● A lot of user interaction that triggers updates

32. When NOT to use MV*
● Your server cannot handle all the requests
● Your app has little interactions on the page
● Data changes rarely
● MV* may be overkill for small projects
○ Heavy to implement - if you could have gotten away
with 1 class, you now have 3

33. You can always combine MV*
with some other framework
Ем виси, ем не виси :)

34. Usage, Support,
Community

35. Releases
● When was the latest version released?
● How often do they release new version?
● Are there currently any betas?
● Is there huge incompatibility between
versions?

36. Support
● How many opened issues are there?
● Is the documentation rich & easy to use?
● How steeper is the learning curve?

37. Community
● Which big projects use the framework?
● How big & active the community is?

38. Usage Statistics
Statistics from
goo.gl/lJrPpl

39. Tips

40. Tips
● Spend some time browsing the source code
● Read other people’s opinion, but don’t count
on them!

41. Tips
● Write a module/component for your App in
plain JavaScript or pseudo code; then
migrate to the selected library/framework
and see how it feels
● TodoMVC has implementations in several
MV* frameworks - check it out todomvc.com

42. Are there any Questions?
****
, ask me :)

43. Thanks for listening!
github.com/ickata
wpbgug.org
blog.ickata.net
sitekreator.com