So who uses Prototype/script.aculo.us here?

[Christophe Porteneuve]

Hi all,

I'm curious to know just how popular these two frameworks are with JEE folks, and what kind of questions keep popping up all the time about their usage either purely client-side or in conjunction with a Java server side.

I'll try and monitor this forum in the next few weeks to help with them. Feel free to post related topics or answers to this one.

Looking forward to the exchange,

Best,

[Bear Bibeault]

We use Prototype, but not Scriptaculous, in the enterprise financial web app at my day job. We also use jQuery.

In my own client projects, I've switched from Prototype to jQuery completely.

[Christophe Porteneuve]

Hey Bear,

Yes, I could see from the forum's history and you own book promotion that you went jQuery all the way. I'm sure John is happy with it :-)

I commend you on your strong participation to the forum in general and jQuery questions in particular. I'll attempt to provide some level of support regarding Prototype and script.aculo.us, at least in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the reply,

[Bear Bibeault]

Originally posted by Christophe Porteneuve:
Yes, I could see from the forum's history and you own book promotion that you went jQuery all the way.

Well, not all the way -- as I said, we use both libraries at my day job. As the author of Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action, I also have a healthy respect for Prototype as well. For my own projects, I'm just finding that I prefer jQuery's unobtrusive approach.
[ February 04, 2008: Message edited by: Bear Bibeault ]

[Bear Bibeault]

P.S. We don't seem to get a whole lot of Prototype questions here, hopefully your book promotion next week will spur some of that on. I'm looking forward to it!

[Ulf Dittmer]

I've started to use the Request/Responders/(Periodical)Updater functionality, and haven't fully understood what else is there, or how to make use of what else is there (the inheritance and DOM extension stuff). That may come over time, of course, as I dip my feet deeper into the water.

One of the things I've been wondering is whether it's possible to prune some of the code if all I need are the above-mentioned calls. I would like to cut down on those 126KB, if at all possible.

[Paul Clapham]

We're using Prototype to support our use of AJAX in our Web applications where I work. The choice between Prototype and jQuery was made by our R&D department (me) after an exhaustive evaluation. Okay, it wasn't exhaustive, but the rumour there was a coin-toss is completely false.

We've also used a few of the other Prototype features but only in a minor way. And our web programming is very small-scale, so we could easily switch to jQuery or something else if we hit a brick wall.

[Christophe Porteneuve]

Hey Ulf,

Originally posted by Ulf Dittmer:
One of the things I've been wondering is whether it's possible to prune some of the code if all I need are the above-mentioned calls. I would like to cut down on those 126KB, if at all possible.

I'm afraid the codebase for Prototype is rather tightly coupled; this is because we're trying to eat our own dog food as much as possible to actually reduce the code footprint. The stance on file size at Prototype Core is that the best way to serve static assets is through a proper cache configuration on the server side (e.g. proper E-Tags) and gzipping whenever possible. A more tepid approach is to pack/minify the lib; people maintain such versions of Prototype when we push out a new release.

Still, I figure some parts can be cut off, but I'm not sure you really want to go with a custom version of the lib that you would need to reshape every time a new version of Prototype comes out and you'd like to leverage its fixes / improvements / new features�

'HTH

[Ulf Dittmer]

Thanks Christophe. The code did look tight at first glance, so I figured it might not be practical. Since the alternative would be to roll our own I think I'll go with Prototype (and live with its footprint).