At the moment I am developing a a table tennis community site, complete with match statistics. It will be totally player centered. Hence the first thing you do on the site is searching for a player. After selecting a player you get all the information on the matches of the current season, as well as the historical ratings.
Data
Besides this “official” data, I want users to be able to add there own content:
- reviews on tournaments they played / viewed,
- discussions on material (rubbers, frames, balls, tables etc.),
- general discussion forum.
This is a lot of data, which somehow needs to be organized on the screen.
Yahoo User Interface (YUI)
This is a research project, so I decided to try out a ready made Javascript and CSS library. I was drawn to the Yahoo CSS library, since it seems a solid solution for cross browser compatibility. I took on the javascript library as well: I also needed tabs, dialogs and data tables.
The initial experience with YUI was very good. A lot of documentation and examples are provided. However, as soon as I created something more complex, unexpected results would occur. Usually leading to: “Where did my tabs/datatable/dialog/etc. go?!?”. The required markup is quite strict. The javascript library is workable, but a bit tedious. Lot’s of components needed to throw together a workable component.
And to make things worse: there will be a lot of differences between Firefox and IE. After working with it for 3-4 weeks, I gave up: Too much trouble and not enough fun for what I want to accomplish…
jQuery UI
At first I declined jQuery (UI) because there was no dataTable component…. I thought. I totally missed the plugins, since I assumed that would be solutions for some edge cases. Not the things you need when you first start using jQuery. I couldn’t be more wrong. The list of plugins is endless and most of them are maintained actively. There is a plugin for almost every problem you can think of…
And then I ran into the themable UI part. Since I eventually want the user interface to be customized by the end user, I was sold instantly. I can now offer the user a selection of over 10 themes to pick from, without any effort. And they all look very polished. Way to go!
It took me almost a week to migrate the application from YUI to jQuery, learning jQuery syntax on the fly. And that’s not hard at all. Very intuitive syntax, simple solutions and sensible defaults. That’s what I like! So, a big thank you to the jQuery team from me.
Programming in javascript just became fun!
I am using yui because it has so many tested, documented widgets. Theming it isn’t easy though. jquery doesn’t come with a bunch of widgets. Are you building your own?
Hi Ken,
No, I am not building my own. There is this jQueryUI project with some widgets and excellent theming. Other widgets you can find under the jQuery plugins section. There’s really loads and loads of them! (Took me a while before I figured that out…
Hope this helps!
Henri