The web technologies have caught up to what my actual skills are – application development. I’ve loved the web – but up until now it much more of a graphic designer’s world. Today with Web 2.0 and the tools to create true interactive web applications, I can concentrate more on my true skills – database driven – interactive applications.
Now for the hard part though – finding the right tools to do the job. The last couple of weeks I have started to look into many of the tools available – mostly in terms of creating nicely refined user interfaces and forms. I started out looking at YUI – which then moved onto Dijit. This led to Scriptaculous and then JQuery and currently Ext JS.
The problem is – I like various aspects of all of these. As far as UI though, I think YUI is the weakest (it completely redefines what a checkbox is, which I do NOT understand), but I do like their underlying AJAX/and javascript framework. I started heavily looking into Dijit, which has a lot of cool easy to use frame effects – although I don’t necessarily like the skinning and some functionality is odd. For instance, I can have a “Tooltip” on a TextBox, but not on a DateTextBox or a TextArea. This led me to JQuery which I really like in terms of the look of it’s various components – such as the pop-up date and the modal panel. However, it doesn’t contain any skinning for form elements such as TextBox or checkBoxes . I’ve tried combining it with Dijit with no success. Finally I have looked at Ext JS – which unlike the others – is NOT free. It has a lot of cool components though. I could experiment with the free download for now and see if I want to spend the $329 for the final product or not.
I looked at Scriptaculuos, but I wasn’t that impressed with it. I’ll look deeper into it, but I was far more impressed with the JQuery and Ext JS. However, The more tool kits I have under my belt the better off I will be anyway.
As I mentioned, it would be nice to combine the various frameworks and pick and choose what I want to use. As it stands, it would probably be YUI for the Javascritpt/AJAX framework, Dijit for form elements and JQuery or Ext JS for components such as pop-up calendars, tab controls, modal panels, etc.
We’ll see where I end up. If anyone else has any suggestions, or experiences with any of these tools or others, let me know.