According to the Burton Group’s research, Prototype is the most used framework for Ajax development. In the survey of 488 Ajax developers conducted by Burton Group, the most popular libraries and frameworks ranked as follows:
Prototype 26.6%
script.aculo.us 19.5%
DWR 14.8%
Dojo 11.1%
Ruby on Rails 10.0%
Rico 6.8%
Ajax.NET 6.8%
Sajax 5.7%
xajax 3.3%
Prototype is leading with 26.6% share and it is used by script.aculo.us and Rico frameworks. Again, Ruby on Rails uses script.aculo.us which is based on Prototype. So together Prototype share is more than 70%. Currently I am using Dojo framework and its market share is way below the Prototype share. Dojo’s packaging system, UI widgets(like Rich Text editor) and its event system makes Dojo as a well engineered framework. I also like its IFrame workaround for back button support. Having these unique features why Dojo is behind the others? Is it because of its heaviness or complexity? Or some thing else?
Also whats the best Ajax framework/toolkit in your perspective? Share your thoughts!!!
personally i think prototype is very light as compared to dojo and is not a full framework. prototype/rico is more of utility.. in my opinion with a few widgets etc..
I guess people are using it for any quick AJAX decorations on their website. But if you need to start from scratch, i would say- Dojo is the way to go..
I like using dwr, even with its shortcomings. It has some good Spring integration and is easy to integrate into a Java web application. That made it fit in very well into my current work environment.
I am personally using Dojo for all my javascript needs on the Something Awful forums, perhaps you've heard of them? Prototype tends to collide with javascript a little more than I'd like, and puts new things in the global namespace, such as the $() shortcut for document.getElementById(). Dojo is better about this sort of thing and stays inside of its own namespace (it's equivalent function is dojo.byId()).
It's hard work running a forum. I do my best to maintain at least 75% uptime though.
I use Prototype and rather build all my widgetry myself. I like having a "dumb" library at hands and utilize it to build my own applications, because then I can more easilly get the accessibility and validity of my applications right.
I also use Yahoo's Event library which raises event-based programming to a completely new level. I have no idea how I managed to live without it before.
Dojo is a terrific toolkit that has suffered from a lack of documentation over the past year and poor management. The lack of documentation makes the learning curve incredibly long and not cost effective to implement.
All requests by the user community to open their wiki for open documentation by the user community falls on deaf ears.
I suspect that the inadequacy of the documentation is a result of the organization's lead developer (Alex Russell being intimately associated with and employed by Site Pen (http://www.sitepen.com/) which derives most of it's income from onsite training specifically on Dojo and Ajax.
SitePen hardly generates much of its income from Dojo training and support. I find it amusing when people post information without knowing what they are talking about.
We certainly have never intentionally withheld information about Dojo. The new version of Dojo has a nice documentation tool, http://dojotoolkit.org/api/