Yse there is always a trade off. The more functionality built in, the more weight it may have. Any framework has it’s “method of operation” that may or may not suit your needs. And yes, the more feature rich you build anything, the less flexible it becomes. But if you design websites, then you want features, and you know what flexibility you are willing to trade.

As for moving the cost of work to the client PC, thats an issue for performance QC, and once again we have to remember that the tradeoff is possibly hours or days of coding and testing something that you are simply not that familiar with, compared to an incredibly reduced time touse the libraries.

And for all those that doubt this, I would suggest you return to coding 80×86 assembler in edit.exe, or code your word processing documents in RTF by hand.

Lets face it, the smart coder is an integrator, using the best of class, and not starting over from scratch every time.

JS is not only very different despite having a PHP/C like syntax, the browsers are also plagued by differences in their implementations of JS. These issues combined create massive headaches and is often the reason people don’t want to learn JS at all.

My suggestion is to read David Flannigan’s book on the language, Crockford’s book, and write some basic JS to get the hang of it. Once you get familiar with the basics of the language, I would suggest going on to a library (and you can even learn JS then).

You just need to get features created on the client and that is what JS does, frameworks make it easy and they make JS beautiful (more beautiful than any vanilla JS).

I decided to learn MooTools a while ago, I’ve been converted by this site’s awesome admin. :)

I want to write code that is unobtrusive, reusable, and best of all, free from the differences of browser implementations (or at least “almost” free).

Not only that, organizations such as Google/Youtube are making use of them and jobs are hiring people who know them because of what they offer web applications. It’s cheaper, smarter, faster, and gives better results. I used to be pretty elitist myself, I still am when it comes to learning most technique, but not in the special case of JS (even though I’m still going to be learning the original language).

Instead you can go through the features of some of the libraries, its coding and can decide before hand if you need to use this library. I guess there is no way that anyone can stop you from writing functionalities that are not there in the library. You can write anytime.

http://demos111.mootools.net/Chain.Periodical

;)

Also yes be lazy but for your laziness who is footing the bill ? the computer. the more lazy you are the more the clients computer has to work, and i for one hate slowness. Image if someone uses a phone to go on your site ? 1 page would be ok but if they start opening lots of tabs and everyone used libraries

The majority of the functionality I would use a framework for, I often find, can be distilled into a dozen or so prototype methods, ajax methods, cookie methods and DOM queries/manipulations. The majority of most frameworks, in my experience, is basically wasted space. The dollar sign function, for instance, is very easily reproducible.

These collected methods, in combination with my use of method chaining, and structuring my code with the module pattern, allow me to write extremely efficient, flexible and portable JavaScript.

That is not to say that a framework is not the right choice for many or most people. All claims of elitism aside, my philosophy is that if I understand 100% of my codebase, I can debug 100% of my codebase.

Also, this “code it yourself” mentality has never really struck me and I’m glad.

If it’s done, it’s done. Especially since it’s done by a team of people concentrating on just that one thing over a period of several months.

Whereas if I were to do it, I would code something that I need in the next 20 minutes. There’s no way to put enough thought into things like that.