Some Popular Libraries

New libraries are popping up all the time; others have seen continual development over a number of years. This is by no means a complete list; it simply attempts to point out some of the more popular current players.

Prototype Framework

The Prototype Framework (http://www.prototypejs.org) has been around for a few years now and is currently in version 1.7. Prototype’s major strengths lie in its DOM extensions and Ajax handling, though it has many more tricks up its sleeve, including JSON support and methods to help with creating and inheriting classes.

Prototype is distributed as a standalone library but also as part of larger projects, such as Ruby on Rails and the script.aculo.us JavaScript library.

Dojo

Dojo (http://www.dojotoolkit.org/) is an open-source toolkit that adds power to JavaScript to simplify building applications and user interfaces. It has features ranging from extra string and math functions to animation and AJAX. The latest versions support not only all major desktop browsers, but also mobile environments, including Apple iOS, Android, and Blackberry with their “Dojo Mobile” HTML5 mobile JavaScript framework.

At the time of writing, Dojo is at version 1.7.

The Yahoo! UI Library

The Yahoo! UI Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/) was developed by Yahoo! and made available to everyone under an open-source license. It includes features for animation, DOM features, event management, and easy-to-use user interface elements such as calendars and sliders.

MooTools

MooTools (http://mootools.net/) is a compact, modular JavaScript framework allowing you to build powerful, flexible, and cross-browser code using a simple-to-understand, well documented API (application programming interface).

jQuery

jQuery (http://jquery.com/) is a fast and compact JavaScript library that simplifies various development tasks, including HTML document traversing, event handling, animation, and Ajax calls for rapid development of interactive websites.