DOMAssistant 2.7 released with unicode support

Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Mattias Hising

DOMAssistant 2.7 released with unicode support

Category: JavaScript, Tags: domassistant, JavaScript, jQuery, Open Source

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Robert Nyman announced that DOMAssistant 2.7 was released today. They have some good competiton from jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Ext and all the others. Interesting to see that DOMAssistant is the first library to actually take things like Unicode-support seriously. Of course localisation and full unicode support will be added to jQuery and Prototype in some way, either as plugins or in the core. I would like to see developers who actually used DOMAssistant in a live project to share their thoughts on it. Why should someone switch from jQuery?

There is a strong team that works on DOMAssistant, maybe it would have been better to actually add these efforts into a library that has more users in order to build a “standard” library.

In order to choose the correct library for your front end architecture it is crucial that you take aspects such as traffic, security, maintenance and competence into account.

What is next

3 Responses to “DOMAssistant 2.7 released with unicode support”

Robert Nyman on April 9th, 2008 12:41:

Thanks for the kind words.

Regarding adding to an existing library vs. building one of your own, I think it’s about mind-sets. Different people have different priorities and opinions on what’s important about a JavaScript library.

With DOMAssistant, for example, performance and small file size are a couple of the most important factors for us.

I also think that no one JavaScript library is the best for every possible scenario, but rather that each JavaScript library have certain criteria to meet where they work best.

Therefore, I’m a strong promotor of alternatives, hence developing DOMAssistant.

Mattias Hising on April 9th, 2008 13:56:

I am with you on alternatives, such as Ext and jQuery do not compete for the same solutions, but I think that either jQuery or Prototype will prevail as the most commonly used (and documented, and supported etc etc) javascript library for a long time. As I see it all javascript libraries now focus on size and performance. Whether or not a function takes 1 ms or 3 ms is just of academic interest and things such as community and documentation is a much bigger and more important decision when choosing your library.

But I do think that DOMAssistant is a good library, and it would be interesting to see it in action on a big site.

What I am looking for now is someone who takes the libraries to a higher level. Now the abstraction level is set for DOM-manipulation through CSS Selectors and the possibility to create plugins. What is the next step?

Robert Nyman on April 9th, 2008 14:26:

While milliseconds might seem of academic interest, it does matter for the end user when a lot of queries are run as soon as a page has loded. How fast is interaction etc added to the web page in an unobtrusive manner.

However, community and documentation is vital to survive and to build a following. The DOMAssistant community is so far quite small, but it’s wonderful to see the dedication of the ones involved and how helpful they are. Not because they’re evangelists or anything similar, but only out of liking the product.

The next step? It’s a good question. For us this time around, Unicode and Chinese documentation was one of those things: to look outside the box and see an entire world.
Next time? We’ll see.

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