Prebuilt widgets are best used for solving common
design issues and can take the pain out of having to deal with complicated edge cases that
inevitably occur when building complicated interfaces.
Figure 4-1. An example page from the ExtJS library featuring a tree widget, layout elements, and
drag and drop
CHAPTER 4 n LIBRARIES 85
Popular Libraries
A few libraries were previously mentioned, but brace yourself. Hundreds of libraries are out
there doing seemingly identical things, with more coming out almost daily. Each library might
take a slightly different approach to a certain feature??”depending on what that developer felt
was important to include.
Thankfully, there??™s plenty of support??”including from large corporations??”for just a handful
of libraries, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses tend to be addressed
quickly by using techniques used by competing libraries or through plug-ins.
One of the largest downfalls of many open-source movements is documentation. You??™ll
certainly find that documentation can be sparse and unclear. Some libraries do a better job
than others at addressing this.
The current leaders of the pack are the following:
??? Dojo
??? Prototype
??? jQuery
??? Yahoo! UI Library (YUI)
??? Mootools
Library plug-ins focused specifically on animation or widgets include the following:
??? Script.aculo.us
??? Interface
??? ExtJS
Recent additions likely to become popular include the following:
??? base2.
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