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Comment by andrelewis | Hacker News Reader

I like jQuery, though it's not a widget provider, Dojo I've consistently run into compatibility issues with over the years, as it seems a bit IE-centric and it's still pretty heavy weight. Although I did notice the newest version seems to boast a revamp.

I liked YUI a lot, and it's clear they put some really solid engineering into their framework but it's a rocky road for Yahoo and they haven't really been updating their api's.

I'm trying to reduce the number of dependencies and like the ability to only load what's needed for a page. Realistically though I am after the equivalent of ImageBundle in GWT, that combines images into one image and maps all the related CSS/JS refs to the single image map.

I'll check out Dojo again but I'm still curious what else is out there?

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Dojo I've consistently run into compatibility issues with over the years, as it seems a bit IE-centric and it's still pretty heavy weight.

I have used Dojo since .4 and have not had many cross browser issues, and the few I have had have mainly been concentrated in IE6 I think I had one issue with FF in that time and it was in one of the dojox libs and one issue with Safari which was a bug with Dojo and was resolved with the next release.

As for it being heavy, Dojo does have a wealth of libraries in it, but the Require.js build system strips the production release of Dojo down to what you need, as well now that they are using requires you can bundle all of your assets up into the build.

On the subject of ImageBundle I don't know the implementation details, but I would assume that it is just generating HTML Image Maps and/or CSS sprites which is pretty easy to do in PhotoShop as well there are a bunch of online generators where you upload a set of image files and it generates the coordinated for each one for you. Here is a link to a sprite generator http://csssprites.com/ . I don't think you will find a pure JavaScript library that does that for you, as most people just use PhotoShop or one of the online applications.

Thanks for your reply, I'll give it a go. I'll be going through a learning curve no matter what I do, but I think I will actually be more productive coding it directly. I'm off to see how to integrate coffescript with Dojo, should be fun :)

no problem, let me know if you have any issue, I will help as much as I can, my email is in my profile. As well feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you have an account.

I concur. I've lately switched away from GWT/GAE to something more like rails/jquery hybrid.

GWT does have some nice things to it, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the best part of it is the separation between server/client, and the forcing function of having to do rendering on the client, where it should be done in the first place.

With jquery, tho, you can achieve a very similar effect .. just have a div with an id and convert it to widget in one line. There are far more , and much more well written widgets on jquery, than on gwt. It is a little more work, but I think it is well worth it.

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