Thursday, February 14, 2008

JQuery vs Prototype JS Libraries

Here are my thoughts on JQuery vs. Prototype - I do not think either is better. It's just a tradeoff based on your needs and team.

JSQuery positives:
Easier
Better Containment
Better Chaining
More Active Community
More Active/Verbal Maintainer
Designer-centric
More concise code

JSQuery Negatives:
Memory hog
Cross-browser support is not so great
Dom centric programming (not so easy for Java folks to wrap their heads around this)
No class support or inheritance (again, odd for Java folks to wrap their head around this)

Prototype positives:
Amazing cross browser support
Low memory footprint (compared to other frameworks)
Great Object Orientation/Functional based programming (easy for Java/back end developers to jump in the game)
OO Coder-centric
More readable code
Better security awareness/responsiveness for Ajax functionality

Prototype negatives:
sizable download file
not as concise as JQuery
community not as active (at times)

Summary: Most designers prefer JSQuery. Most Java Programmers prefer Prototype. But if you would like to have your cake and eat it to, then use both, together.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

It's my Vista Party and I'll cry if I want to

You would cry too if it happened to you.

Last week I was handed a new Vista Ultimate(tm) machine as my primary Java development machine. Yes, I wept. I tossed and turned for nights wondering WHY WHY did this happen to me? But as a social experiment and respect for my new boss, I'm going to give it a good ol college try. So far, Java 1.5 and Eclipse installed just fine. I stripped almost every feature from Vista that I could using this very reasonable gamers tweak guide for speeding up Vista. http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2247431,00.asp

But I hit my first wall when trying to install MySQL 5.0. MySQL MySQLInstanceConfig 5.0.51a simply does not work on any version of Vista due to some error with UAC configuration. Admittedly, it was the MySQL developers fault, not Vista. MySQL 5.0.45 is the latest version of MySQL to actually run properly on Vista as of this posting.

Charging forward with Vista laptop in hand....