Viva MooTools!

As you may remember from my last posts, I’ve been working on a Web 2.0 prototype recently. The work was so cool because there were no technology constraints (all the decisions was entirely mine) and almost no legacy solutions present. Even better I was partially responsible for designing the prototype’s interaction layer which taught me a lot.

So one of the first decisions made was choosing the JavaScript framework. I opted for MooTools as their 1.2 beta version looked very interesting and I’ve never used MooTools for such big project. I always thought MooTools is best for small to mid sized projects (rather websites than web applications) but now I think it fits really nice into big projects as well. Comparing to YUI or ExtJS it is far simpler and lacks sophisticated tools & components, but being smaller makes it a far better option for rapid prototyping tasks. Also thanks to the Mootools community the components base is growing faster and faster which makes our work easier.

So let’s stress some places MooTools really shine in:

• Class hierarchy (from Hash object) and intuitive way of creating new classes by extending the Class object;
• The very simple yet efficient way the method binding and scoping is done;
• Support for CSS3 selectors;
• Really well written and documented source code;
• Modular packaging & dependency system (greatly decreasing the size and download times).

I really like the way they did the framework. I think a nice comparison with YUI can be done by comparing MooTools to Ruby and YUI to Java/C++. Ruby is a very effective language, but it may not be good enough for all of you as the Java/C++ are much more versatile solutions but lacking the beauty and agility the Ruby has. And so MooTools has it. I hope you’ll have a chance to use it as it’s a real pleasure to use and fun to work with.

Enjoy!!

PS) Today I’ve updated the Forms library to version 0.7 which among other improvements introduces full MooTools support!