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	TABLE OF CONTENTS AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits Evaluating AJAX Frameworks Building the Prototypes Compare Ease of Development Making the Final Decision

Compare Ease of Development

Throughout the process of building and testing the prototypes using each AJAX framework, we got a good understanding of how to work with each framework and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Overall, Dojo provides more features and HTML widgets than YUI and Prototype. However, Dojo's widget customization requires some effort. Each widget requires one or more JavaScript files and possibly an HTML template file, images, and a stylesheet. Styles are somewhat tied to the JavaScript and HTML templates. If the template to build the widget is different from the design you were given, it may take some time to customize it. This happened to us when we used the HTML TabContainer widget. None of our Java developers are good at the stylesheet, and we had to turn to our graphic designer to change the default style for the widget to suit our needs. This isn't an issue with YUI or Prototype because their styles are separated from the dynamic behavior of the hub.

As developers, we were also concerned about ease-of-use with each AJAX framework. This is related to how well each framework is documented, whether there are examples that we can quickly try, and how easy it is to understand the source code. All three of our demos stretched our JavaScript expertise. JavaScript knowledge is an important consideration for teams starting their first AJAX implementation.

We took a look at the source code of each framework and felt that YUI is easier to understand because of its well-documented code and detailed tutorials from the Yahoo website. At the time of this development project, both Dojo and Prototype lacked complete documentation and we had to try to build our own prototypes. In the end, YUI stands out as the easiest to work with.

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