We’ve been debating switching our Ruby on Rails application over to jQuery from the Prototype JavaScript Framework that comes standard with Rails. Several different items prompted us to evaluate our strategy:
- We already had to use jQuery for a special word processor widget we used so have both frameworks resulted in going from 150k of JavaScript to 300k, reducing the user experience due to download times and browser performance
- There was a much better tree control with drag and drop available for jQuery
- jQuery’s syntax is more Ruby-like
- jQuery’s UI library is more mature now (it’s similar to Scriptaculous)
After lots of researching and testing we’ve decided to make the switch. So far so good…
David Cummings on Startups 