MooTools v/s jQuery

mootools_vs_jquery

MooTools v/s jQuery is a hot topic as with the advent of technology every developer is using JavaScript in one way or another. Picking up a library is not an easy task specially if you are working somewhere where they already have a set pattern or their libraries defined. Ideally, every company is either working with Moo Tools or jQuery based on their past experiences or developement expertise. Although, both of the This article will bring some of the points to your notice before choosing between Moo Tools or jQuery as your library.

Apart from Moo Tools and jQuery there are other frameworks too which are used quite extensively like Dojo, Ext, YUI and Prototype. But, we are not going much into these framework at this moment and will only consider Mootools and jQuery. I will write an analysis covering all the JavaScript framework later.

Ease Of Learning

jQuery is quite easy to learn and has a good community support. If you are not a JavaScript freak still jQuery will be easier to learn and accomplish things where Moo Tools will require you to spend more time. In one line we can say that learning curve will be steep in Moo Tools than jQuery. In terms of community support, availability of books, search queries on Google its clearly evident that jQuery is leading the race with huge margin. Why jQuery is more popular? We can say just because of the learning ease, excellent documentation and active promotion of jQuery library.

DOM & Pure JavaScript

When we want to work only with DOM (Where 99% of all JavaScript runs) jQuery is far superior than Moo Tools. One reason why jQuery is so popular because of the reason that it does not expects you be learn JavaScript inside out. You are not required to think through prototypal inheritance, binding, “this”, and native prototypes. But, when we think in terms of JavaScript in full breadth we will notice that jQuery is simply focusing on DOM only. jQuery doesn’t address inheritance, basic utilities of all the native types in the JavaScript language etc. Still, if you want to do these you have to write your own stuff. jQuery makes the DOM your playground, but the rest of JavaScript is just not in its scope.

Moo Tools on the other hand is quite different and covers entire JavaScript language not just DOM. This is one of the reason of Moo Tools being bit hard for the early developers. Because MooTools focuses on making the JavaScript API itself more stable and coherent, it is focused less on giving you an interface that “changes the way you write JavaScript” and more on making JavaScript as a whole less frustrating; MooTools is an extension to the JavaScript language. MooTools tries to make JavaScript the way it is meant to be. A significant portion of the core library is spent on augmenting Function, String, Array, Number, Element and other prototypes. The other big thing it offers is a function called Class.

jQuery does not offer an inheritance system nor does it offer any enhancements to native objects (Function, String, etc). This is not a deficiency of jQuery as the authors of jQuery could easily offer these things. Rather, they have designed a toolkit with a different goal in mind. Where MooTools aims to make JavaScript more fun, jQuery aims to make the DOM more fun and its designers have chosen to limit their scope to that task.

In broader way we can say that everything you can do in jQuery can be done in Moo Tools but there is no way to emulate stuff done in Moo Tools into jQuery code because of jQuery’s focus on the DOM. MooTools has a broader functionality than jQuery, but there’s nothing about jQuery that prevents you from doing those things.

jQuery focuses on expressiveness, quick and easy coding, and the DOM while MooTools focuses on extension, inheritance, legibility, reuse, and maintainability.

Further, the MooTools core does not contain every feature you can imagine and neither does the jQuery core. Both frameworks keep their cores rather lean, leaving it to you and others to write plug-ins and extensions. Their job is not to give you every feature you could want but to give you the tools so that you can implement anything you can imagine. This is the power of JavaScript, and of JavaScript frameworks in general, and both frameworks excel at it. MooTools takes a more holistic approach and gives you tools to write anything you can imagine beyond the scope of the DOM, but pays the price by having a steeper learning curve. MooTools extensibility and holistic approach gives you a superset of jQuery’s features, but jQuery’s focus on a slick DOM API doesn’t preclude you from using the native inheritance methods of JavaScript or from using a class system like MooTools if you want it.

Slickspeed is a small analytical approach to benchmark the performance of JS frameworks. If you’ve got any thoughts, comments or suggestions for things we could add, leave a comment! Also please Subscribe to our RSS for latest tips, tricks and examples on cutting edge stuff.

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