JSConf is coming up on Friday, and I’ll be there. I was too late to get a normal “track A” talk in, but I am scheduled in the “track B” room for Saturday at 1:45PM to talk about a standard library for JavaScript development outside of the browser. It’ll be a 30 minute session, and I’m hoping to have some cool stuff to show!
I hope to see you there!
Hi Kumar,
Actually, there’s a whole group of people working on this, and we’d certainly love more help!
http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2009/01/29/what-server-side-javascript-needs/
We’ve actually got a good collection of people who are involved in various server side JavaScript frameworks and tools.
Kevin
aha, thanks for the link (/me catching up with the server group). I am more interested in a client side standard library (but, same thing). I just want one place like the Python stdlib to do the common stuff. Currently, dojo comes the closest to this because it offers so many utilities but it is not very well documented. jQuery has a tight core with useful utilities and many plugins exist that fill the gaps but plugins generally lack automated tests and all of jquery suffers from namespace pollution. and many other frameworks that attempt to offer a stdlib of sorts.
Client side is a different matter entirely…
*Some* of Dojo is not documented well, but quite a bit of it is these days. dojocampus helps, api.dojotoolkit.org is good, and there are several books.
IIRC, jQuery does not *have* to suffer from namespace pollution. jQuery is set up to be a good in-page citizen.
On the client, I say “go with the library that is closest to what you need to do”. They each have their strengths.
I do like dojo and it has a *ton* of documentation. I used it for a large site and dug in pretty deep. My complaint is more that the documentation is poorly organized and lacks narrative flow. Sounds picky (well, it is picky) but I have a hard time finding things in their docs and I never know where to go. Most of what I have learned about dojo has been by reading their code and tests which slows me down some.
with jquery I was thinking about the way all plugins share the same namespace, $.
oh! I have been talking about this same idea with some people for a while. Cool. unfortunately I can’t make the conference but please comment later if there is a video or slides to see. Also, I may be available to help with development of something like this.