Topic awaiting preservation: Using JavaScipt Libraries??

I am very curious about your opinion about Javascript libraries. Does anyone use them? Or do you think thay are crap? And why is it so?

Personally i am working full-time in an non webrelated job and my web design skill are mostly needed for some small voluntary jobs. I like playing with those techniques, however i don't have time enough to keep all techniques up to date. So i try to concentrate on the html/css part however sometimes some client side scripting would be very convenient. Now i wonder if using Javascipt libraries would be a god idea to create better sites. Most libraries are very complex and hard to understand for someone like me who writes some poor code himself.
So what are the pro's and con's from Javascript libraries like these:
glimmer
cross-browser

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Well, the problem with hand-written libraries is that you can't do anything you want with them. Sure, you have the source, but you're going to end up tweaking it a ton anyway. Basically, they are a limited subset of what's possible; and considering rendering things in Javascript isn't all that difficult, I don't mind reinventing the wheel. Especially when I constantly make improvements to my best wheels (hovercrafts, jet engine, warp drives, you know, fun stuff ).

I like to hand-code specific rendering routines to whatever particular task I am working on at the time. It's faster and more educational for me.

Also, I don't usually like dealing with other people's interfaces. I find that my coding style is typically much different than other peoples, and doing things their way isn't always my preference. There are times where the advantages vastly outweight the downsides (such as C++'s STL), but for the most part, I am happy doing my own thing.

Especially since I have yet to make a massive Javascript program... all mine could fit on a page, and so it would be awfully silly for me to use a giant library for a teeny little toy app.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke
"Any sufficiently arcane magic is indistinguishable from technology." -- P. David Lebling

I tend to write my own JavaScript libraries and use them over and over. I agree with Iron Wallaby that using other peoples libraries, I usually end up re-writing most of it because they use a different style of interface to the library than I want to use and their library won't fit into my structure.

Another drawback of other libraries is that you usually can't use just one. When a developer starts to create a set of libraries he usually makes the second one depend on the first and the third depends on the first two etc. So when you find a library that has a routine in it that does just what you want to do, you include it in your pages and find that you get errors because the routine refers to routines in another library which you didn't need to use. So you include the next library, etc. Pretty soon you have included the entire suite of libraries so that you can do one function and have added an extra 100k to the size of your pages. You would have been better off just writing the function from scratch.

-- not necessarily stoned... just beautiful.

I like to think of javascript libraries as some useful / simple set of funcs/classes. I try to collect them, some of them you can see here: http://gosu.pl/dhtml/javascript-libraries.html . And what I think about such libraries - they are cool

ScottAndrew has a nice collection of DHTML libraries as well
http://www.scottandrew.com/weblog/dhtmllibs

--- RPG Fan ---

I've tried to write some generic functions for common tasks, like getElementsByClassName() or a PNG handler which transforms elements (either img with a SRC, div with a background image via CSS or whatever) to use PNG where supported.

I've used these libraries a few times now in personal projects and they've been pretty much "plug-n-play" (serving their purpose) and have saved me from having to rewrite an existing solution.

It makes sense I think to write functions that are self-contained (so they obviously don't interfere with the rest of your objects etc.) and simplify what would otherwise be a repetitive or "damn, I have to solve this problem yet again" bit of code.

The only JavaScript library I've found that is genuinely useful is the 1kDHTML API by Chris Nott of Dithered, who is also the creator of the most useful CSS hacks summary on the net.

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