mootools开发者：jQuery vs MooTools

Most people getting started with JavaScript these days are faced with the challenging task of picking a library to use, or at least which one to learn first. If you're working for a company chances are they have already chosen a framework for you, in which case the point is somewhat moot. If this is the case and they've chosen MooTools and you're used to jQuery , then this article might still be of some use to you.

Every day on twitter I see numerous posts that boil down to "MooTools or jQuery?" This article aims to help you make that choice.

Disclaimer

I am a MooTools developer. I work on the MooTools framework. I blog about MooTools. I wrote the main online tutorial and the book about MooTools . Obviously, I have a perspective that is somewhat biased. I'll also point out that I don't use jQuery that often. If you're a jQuery developer and see anything that I have misrepresented here, please contact me and help me rectify the issue. My objective here is to be helpful and accurate to people - not to sell one framework over another.

Purpose

Helping you make a choice between these two frameworks involves me telling you how they are different. I'll start out by saying that both of them are excellent choices . You can't make a wrong choice here. Both frameworks have their strengths and weaknesses, but, in general, they are both great choices. There are other frameworks out there that are worth digging into as well. Dojo , Prototype , YUI , Ext and others are all great choices. Which one you choose really has more to do with your own style and what you need to accomplish. The purpose of this article is to focus on MooTools and jQuery, as increasingly these are the two frameworks that I see a lot of people considering. Finally, I'm not trying to convince anyone to switch from one framework to the other. There are interesting things about both frameworks from which you can learn. You can read a little more about this article and why I wrote it in my blog post on Clientcide where I announced it .

Table o' Contents

• The Mottos Say It All
• The Learning Curve and The Community
• What JavaScript Is Good For
  • More Than Just The DOM
  • Inheritance with JavaScript
  • Self Reference
• MooTools Makes JavaScript Itself More Fun
• jQuery Makes the DOM More Fun
• Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
• MooTools Let's You Have It Your Way
• Chaining as a Design Pattern
• Reusing Code with jQuery
• Reusing Code with MooTools
  • MooTools and Inheritance
  • Extending and Implementing Classes
• Decision Time
• Discussion