Dr. Dobbs is currently featuring a case study of the Ajax framework selection process of a development team at T. Rowe Price. The team evaluated a number of popular Ajax frameworks for use in their next generation application:
After initial review GWT was eliminated due to the legacy team division of UI and back end developer along with the requirement of learning a new Java based API. DWR was also eliminated due to the patch needed for the version evaluated to work with the Websphere Application Server used by T. Rowe Price. This left Prototype, Dojo, and Yahoo UI for continued evaluation.
- Dojo 0.3.1 (dojotoolkit.org).
- Prototype and Scriptaculous 1.4 (www.prototypejs.org and script.aculo.us).
- Direct Web Reporting 1.0 (getahead.org/dwr).
- Yahoo! User Interface Library 0.11.1 (developer.yahoo.com/yui).
- Google Web Toolkit 1.0 (code.google.com/webtoolkit).
The case study then goes on to compare how each framework fulfilled the requirements of creating a tabbed ajax widget and a dynamic "hub" widget with a title bar. All three required custom work for the desired tab widget functionality with Dojo providing the closest functionality out of the box. The team then moved on to look at load times:
...The smaller the footprint of the framework used, the less likely performance degradation occurs. The total compressed JavaScript file sizes required by YUI (22K) and Prototype (32K) are significantly smaller than the single custom Dojo JavaScript file, which is about 200K. All three libraries performed well with a high-speed connection; however, the YUI and Prototype/Scriptaculous prototypes performed faster with 56K dial-up connections...
Finally the team looked at overall ease of development. The consensus was that Dojo provided more features and widgets but customization was harder due to the number of files needing modifications. Yahoo UI was ultimately choose due to its well documented code and detailed tutorials on the Yahoo website.