Which is better? The new Google Web Toolkit or Yahoo’s UI Library?
And I don’t mean just in terms of capabilities… but how about:
- how well they interoperate?
- how good their licenses are?
- how responsive their communities are?
- how they compare with other open source alternatives
I’m not much of a developer, but come the next Mash Pit, I’d like to know which framework or toolkit I should be betting on.
Factory Joe 
Dojo’s the best, and I’m not just biased 🙂
I was initially very skeptical of Dojo, but got slowly pulled in. It has an amazingly large group of very talented developers, and is in for the long-haul. Some of the coolest stuff is happening in there. I’ve fully thrown my chips into the Dojo camp, and now develop for it exclusively as a commiter and in my client projects.
Dojo has a real community, like Apache; none of the other projects have gone beyond a single benevolent dictator yet, or a single company. Prototype is probably the one exception, but Prototype has pretty much delivered on it’s goal and doesn’t have more ambitious things to pull off now.
Expect real breakthroughs from Dojo, like the Dojo Storage work I just delivered, the work being done on cross-site API invocation that others are working on, cross-browser vector graphics, and more.
Best,
Brad
Hi Chris,
I don’t know if I got this wrong, but if you think about it GWT does two separate things:
1. Remoting (exposing Java methods to js on the browser)
2. UI toolkit
But YUI does only the UI part (as the name suggests).
There are lots of similar projects or projects which do things partially. Like for example, at our company we have used DWR + YUI to achieve what GWT claims to let you achieve. More on the DWR (Direct Web Remoting) here: http://getahead.ltd.uk/dwr
There’s similar discussion going on here: http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-web-toolkit-ajax-apps-from-java
Cheers,
Harish
Dojo just freeze my site 🙂
if you’re a java developer, then GWT is best suited. You just code in java with GWT API and GWT will do the conversion to javascript. And GWT has a very responsive community as far as I could note in their groups.