While I was at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I attended a panel entitled Examining Ajax Frameworks.
In truth there wasn’t anything specifically Ajax-y about the frameworks or the panel: just one more example of the watering down of the term. It was still a great panel mostly thanks to Paxman-like moderation of Simon Willison.
From left to right, the panel consisted of:
- John Resig, creator of jQuery,
- Matt Sweeney from the YUI library,
- Alex Russell of Dojo,
- and Bret Taylor representing the Google Web Toolkit
Despite Simon’s best efforts to get a good flame war going, the panelist were having none of it. They were being far too Californian and friendly about the whole thing.
Simon grilled them with questions like how their libraries coped with an approach of progressive enhancement—a very good question. One of the other tasks set by Simon was for each developer to place their library on the continuum between being used to develop websites and being used to create fully-blown web applications (sort of like the teacher in Donnie Darko asking pupils to make a mark on the line between fear and love).
jQuery was very much on the website end of the scale; best used to add interactive niceties to a website without making JavaScript a requirement. YUI is similar but with some widgets that start to get pretty complex. Dojo is definitely for applications where JavaScript is a prerequisite. GWT is so application-centric that you’re supposed to actually write your JavaScript in Java… something I still cannot fathom.
It was then that I noticed the happy coincidence of the seating arrangement. By happy chance, the framework builders had positioned themselves on the panel in a way that corresponded perfectly with how their libraries fit on the sliding scale from websites to applications.
I couldn’t resist grabbing a photo and breaking out Photoshop to illustrate this fortuitous alignment.
Posted by Jeremy on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 5:31pm
Comments
nice job representing the key people and interests, had a great at this years event and look forward to making next years
I missed the web2expo this year, hopefully there will be a big german grpuo again next year!
We may wait till next year, why not?! Guys, work in the same way!
Love the pic and had a great time at the event!!! I look forward to next years!!
Thanks for Bret Taylor’s link. I enjoy his blog
"(sort of like the teacher in Donnie Darko asking pupils to make a mark on the line between fear and love)" I like this part I watched the movie so i know what You mean. And thank for photo Jeremy, it really illustrate this fortuitous alignment. Greetings
I imagine jQuery in other way. Nice photo you’ve got!
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