Having gone through these three frameworks, I’m going to say something I wish other review sites said: For each purpose, there is a “best” framework. It all depends on context.
The Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)
If you’re building a rich web application from scratch, YUI will have very thorough tools to do anything you want. As long as you survive writing the code.
If you’re looking to add a little ajax and dhtml to your exisiting web page, or need a lightweight, high performance library, go with Mootools.
Somewhere between Mootools and YUI, jQuery has a lot of features and is very tidy to code.
Perhaps we can compare the philosophies behind each framework by examining their respective homepages:
| YUI | jQuery | Mootools | |
|---|---|---|---|
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| Slogan | The YUI Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. | The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library | a compact javascript framework |
| Size | 8.91KB | 13.41KB | 7.33KB |
| Comment | Look at how busy and dated their homepage is… but it is compact. | A very slick page, but underneath it, it is a little bloated. | Simple and clean. |