In there we had a couple of slides that talked about the prolification of Ajax frameworks. Our key points were:

• There are so many freaking frameworks
• We used to be able to separate the frameworks into camps. If you sterotype you have: Dojo as the standard lib for JavaScript; Prototype as the simple Ajax/JS wrapper; jQuery as the first CSS driven approach; GWT as the “Want to do Ajax without learning JavaScript and worrying about cross browser?”. These days we have seen normalization. Dojo Core is just as small as the other guys. Prototype and jQuery have plugin communities too. We have jQuery UI, Dijit/dojo.gfx to give you graphics effects a la Script.aculo.us.
• At some point, depending on your requirements, pick one and get running with it.

We show the dart board morphing to just show a few frameworks. The major point there is to just get one and get going, not that we are blessing certain frameworks.

I started to get emails after the presentation that would say something like:

• I use YUI. Should I switch to one of the frameworks you mention?
• Why isn’t ExtJS on this short list?

When I met some of the YUI team last week they said that they had heard some of the same comments. I wanted to make it clear that YUI is a great framework, and based on learning about where they are going next, you are in good hands.

Alex Russell wrote a post on Gears De-Branding which took one (valid) shot at YUI, calling it a “source-available-but-not-open projects”. YUI currently doesn’t score as high as Dojo and the like and I think the YUI team gets that, and we will be seeing a change there in the near future.

Here is the entire presentation, which makes next to no sense without us talkng… but hey, pretty pictures!