Appendix C. Ajax frameworks and libraries
The last year has seen a rapid proliferation of Ajax and JavaScript frameworks, from small cross-browser wrapper utilities to complete end-to-end client and server solutions. In this appendix, we attempt to take a snapshot of the current range of offerings, with apologies to any that we’ve omitted.
We, the authors of this book, haven’t personally used all of these frameworks and toolkits in a production setting, and in many cases we’ve based our descriptions on the author or vendor’s own claims for the toolkit. If you’re reading this a year after publication, many of the descriptions will be wildly inaccurate or out of date, and many of the frameworks may have been abandoned or absorbed into other projects. The current state of play is unstable, in our opinions, and we would expect a few successful frameworks to predominate over the next 12 months.
So here, without any further ado, is our roundup of Ajax frameworks that you might encounter in the wild. We haven’t attempted to categorize them beyond listing them alphabetically. Happy coding!
Open source
Adds accesskey underlining to pages without requiring <u> tags in the source. Tag items with the accesskey attribute and JavaScript will create the appropriate underlining tags in the DOM.
Commercial with free download
Rich client JavaScript widgets; current flagship product is a rich grid widget.