Comments on: Podcast 52: Javascript Libraries

By: Treppenlift

Treppenlift — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:02:02 +0000

The ultimate experience is something that happens in the user, and it is theirs. They own it.

By: Geschenke

Geschenke — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:26:03 +0000

Great podcast, i love it! Greetings from Germany!

By: Autoversicherung

Autoversicherung — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:14:42 +0000

Nice site. I love the interview. My favorit. Thanks and best regards

By: Werbeagentur

Werbeagentur — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:39:50 +0000

While it doesn't make sense to use Prototype for Element? Fade, that's quite a straw-man argument against using frameworks at all. Thanks from Germany

By: Laura

Laura — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:45:24 +0000

I loved this interview. I have followed Dustin for some time now, and learned a lot from his stuff. Dustin - please keep up the great tuts!Great to see two of my faves together on one show.

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 17:31:17 +0000

jQuery only really seems packed because the internal functionality is tag soup (almost qualifies as obfuscated). My thoughts toward YUI can't seem anything else but biased however I truly think they've done the best job than any other JavaScript library. The fact that each utility is broken up into separate sets of tasks makes it all the more powerful. When gZipped and minified, each utility will average about 2.5k each

By: Yehuda Katz

Yehuda Katz — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 13:07:14 +0000

Dustin reiterated a lot of the straw men about JS libraries that really stem from an ignorance of the field. Unfortunately, Paul's uncritical acceptance of his arguments made some really questionable statements seem insightful. 1) They're really big and bloated: While that might be said about YUI, take a look at jQuery. The entire library, when packed, is 16k. Most sites would balk at using a title graphic double that size. And jQuery packs in a lot of functionality. 2) Why not roll your own for the functions you need? While that might work fine for a tooltip, that doesn't make much sense when doing routine AJAX. There's quite a bit of repeatable stuff you'll need to do, but is non-trivial cross-browser. Not having to think about how, exactly, you're going to get the height of an element (and it's really, really non-trivial), or how you're going to add, remove, or swap a class from an element is quite a boost in productivity. And Dustin missed perhaps the best thing about Javascript libraries (and jQuery in particular). You can layer functionality on top of the framework, because you know the pieces will work. And there's quite a bit of layering that can be done (check out http://jquery.com/plugins for some clever things people have done). Bottom line: While it doesn't make sense to use Prototype for Element.fade, that's quite a straw-man argument against using frameworks at all. I fancy myself a fairly good Javascript developer, and it just makes no sense for me to roll my own when a perfectly good library already exists. To me, that's akin to a C or Java developer refusing to use libraries because they'd rather roll their own. It makes no sense. Why be saddled with the built-in limitations of a language when perfectly good extensions, by perfectly smart people, exist. And that's a lot of why frameworks are so appealing: smart people spend the better part of every day figuring out solutions to complicated problems (think: determining the height of an element cross-browser regardless of positioning) that would just cause any sane person to give up in frustration. It's not embarrassing to use libraries. People do so in every single other language. There's no reason for Javascript to be different.

By: Dustin Diaz

Dustin Diaz — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 00:47:27 +0000

Wow Paul, Your listeners are too kind ;).

By: grocal

grocal — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 08:23:36 +0000

Hi there Paul!
I’ve found out about you podcast from local magazine. I’ve decided to download all episodes and listen to them carefully. So far I’m somewhere at the beginning but even from that point I can see that information you provide is priceless.
Anyway, I want just to mention one thing. Naming of mp3 files and ID3 tags. It is soooo damn hard to maintain order in files which name format is so bad. Please – if it is possible – provide date in ID3 tab for every file and try to name files that they will be ordered. For example it would be good to follow such rule:
YY-mm-dd_TrackNo_Artist_Title_otherinfo.mp3
This way every episode will be ordered by date and show number when using any file browser on any system. Date format which is being used now makes such a mess in file ordering.
Let’s consider this as a step towards usability ;)
Bye,
grocal

By: Nora Brown

Nora Brown — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 04:07:18 +0000

I found it a contradiction that Dustin Diaz admitted to not having a grasp of the design-y, aesthetic side of things (also evidenced by a look at his site), yet he seemed to expect web designers to implement all their own javascript, rather than piggy-backing on the various libraries that are out there.