A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life. - Henry Ward Beecher
iPhone and JavaScript Development
This is Part 2 of my development of the iPhone Journal application. In Part 1 I discussed the state of iPhone development and the Aptana development environment. The iPhone is the ideal platform for JavaScript enabled Web 2.0 applications. While Web 2.0 applications can bring an exciting and interactive user interface to users, their development can be tedious and time consuming for developers. Fortunately a large number of open source libraries have been developed which can help ease the burden on developers. Here are the essential JavaScript library offerings:
iUI
iUI is a JavaScript and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) bundle developed by Joe Hewitt, the creator of the Firebug (a web Firefox web development plug-in that provides access to web development tools within Firefox). The iUI library provides an easy way for developers to create standard iPhone navigational menus for web applications.
Dojo
The Dojo toolkit, developed by Alex Russell, is a modular JavaScript library that is target to speeding up the development of Ajax enabled web applications. Dojo provides JavaScript, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and CSS components that assist in the development of interactive user interfaces, providing features such as: menus, tabs, tool tips, sortable tables, dynamic charting, tree controls, calendars, clocks, and much more.
jQuery
jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript library developed by John Resig in early 2006. jQuery provides developers with a number of functions that ease DOM (Document Object Model) element references, traversals, and modifications. Support for CSS manipulation, Ajax, and animations are also provided.
Prototype
Prototype (which I’ve blogged about in more detail previously) is a JavaScript Framework created by Sam Stephenson. Prototype evolved out of the Ruby on Rails project, and has become a project on it's own. Providing a number of useful functions, it has become a core foundation of many AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) frameworks. Prototype provides developers many useful JavaScript functions that speed the web development process.