Creative Juice Bo. Co. Presents

Hello jQuery! Be Gentle.

Over the past year or so, I've been switching back and forth using two popular javascript frameworks, jQuery and Prototype. I don't always use them, I prefer to make most of my javascript non-dependant, but at times its unavoidable. An example would be trying to do some AJAX stuff, I just find it easier to implement one of the frameworks to handle the grunt work and I just build my script on top of it. For the most part I was leaning towards Prototype.

That is until 2 nights ago. I spent 5 hours trying to implement a simple AJAX request with a ColdFusion CFC and nothing was happening. There was no feedback at all. No error responses. No transport responses. Nothing! I tried using FireBug, a great little FireFox extension, to try to determine what was going on. I traced through all the calls, and I could not find any problems or errors in the code.

At first, I thought it was my CFC, so I wasted a lot of time rewriting it, changing it, tweaking it, poking it, I did everything I could think of. I couldn't figure out what was going on. It seemed to be working fine. So I turned my attention to Prototype. I would think, if there was a problem, it would report it. Some kind of error or console message, but I wasn't seeing anything. So on a whim, I decided to try jQuery instead. Low and behold, it worked perfectly the first time I tried it.

Now, I'm not sure what was going on with Prototype, but to waste that much of my time kind of pissed me off. So I have now officially sworn of using it for any future projects.

I would be curious to hear back from you guys on your experience using various frameworks out there. Do you prefer one over the other, and if so why?