Since my own personal JavaScript framework which I constructed to build Mango has now ballooned into nearly a couple of thousand lines of code, it has become near impossible to maintain single handedly. So I have decided to throw it in the bin. It was with great sadness and a heavy heart that I pressed the delete button and then banished what had become know as ‘The Bible’ (Many lines most of which are open for interpretation) from the CVS. But the day comes in every programmer’s life when the code they have given blood sweat and tears to write gets canned, usually because other developers can’t get their head around a library which has three thousand lines of code and only two lines of documentation (Bloody amateurs!).

Once the decision had been made, it was time to go out shopping for a (lesser) JavaScript library, one whose documentation was not written on the back of a napkin. To my surprise some of them were very good! Last time I looked at JavaScript libraries Prototype ruled the roost with her bionic arm named script.aculo.us. She looked very nice and did everything you wanted her to do in all the important departments, but her Achilles heal was the fact she weighed as much as fully fueled aircraft carrier. This time around though there are some other contenders for the crown.

I first went back to look at prototype and script.aculo.us. Despite hearing rumors she’d been on the Atkins diet I returned to find her exactly the same weight as the last time I saw her but now also diabetic. The other frameworks that really stood out from the pack for me were JQuery and Mootools.