Javascript is definately back in fashion, with a number of libraries popping up to help out with application development. I think overall this is fine, so long as you have an appreciation of what is actually happening under the scenes. I don’t think a library should dictate the way that you build an application, rather enable you to build it more efficiently.

I’ve started using elements of the Yahoo YUI library which is very impressive. There seem to be a lot of very useful little utility functions available, the kind of thing that you would typically rewrite on each project.

I’m quite curious about how the Microsoft and Yahoo libraries compare. I’ll post some information about this when I’ve had a chance to look in more detail at Atlas.

I have to say I’m seriously impressed with the work they have done. A lot of the ideas are pretty simple, but the kind of thing that you write from scratch on each project when it’s needed. However, in this case it’s had a load of development and cross browser testing effort thrown at it.

Some of the methods on their DOM object are extremely useful – things like getting the viewport dimensions, or getElementsByClassName. In addition, the library that covers event handling provides a number of very practical features that you could start using immediately.

I am naturally a little sceptical about this kind of thing – I think it’s very important to understand the core technologies that a framework is based on. However these libraries provide the kind of work that you would code yourself, but in a tidy, useable, documented package.

There will be a slight hit on bandwidth, but the library is split into different modules, so you should be able to take what you need without too much extra.

I’ll certainly consider using this on future projects.