Opinion: Protaculous to JQuery
Last night I went to my local CFUG meeting, to hear Adam Lehman from Adobe talk about the new Flash Platform & Coldfusion Products. A lot of it was mouth-watering displays of computational power and speed optimization on behalf of the server & speedier compile times in the new Flash Builder.
He also talked about how Coldfusion is continuing with ExtJS, which to use with Prototype/Scriptaculous you’d need to completely rewrite your code. BUT with ExtJS works with JQuery out of the box, and that’s probably a good thing.
For a while I’ve been a Prototype/Scriptaculous lover, and also an Adobe fan. To see Adobe supporting JQuery kinda hurts, but I’m starting to think that Adobe has the right idea. JQuery is ‘packable’ meaning that the 120Kb library can be compacted down to 56Kb, unlike Prototype whose size is 128Kb, and cannot be packed any smaller. Prototype also requires Scriptaculous for effects (another 4Kb) pushing the required file-size to 132Kb, which is a lot for some of the things I’m doing (Which is basically Modal Windows, Slide-shows & Accordions.)
So why was I so adamant about Protaculous? Mostly because I took the trouble to learn how to use it well. But the Disadvantages are starting to out-weight the learning curve.
Time to start Re-Writing Code