Every day on twitter I see posts where people are asking themselves the same question: MooTools or jQuery? This is because I have a saved search for “mootools.” Doing a search for “dojo” or “prototype” would find similar tweets from people considering those frameworks or jQuery. The fact is, jQuery is incredibly popular and it’s own popularity breeds adoption as much as the fact that it’s a good bit of software.

Focusing on the “MooTools or jQuery” question, it’s clear that there isn’t a great resource that helps people decide. Looking at the documentation and examples for the two libraries shows they share a lot of functionality. If you’re just now, in 2009, trying to decide which one of these frameworks you want to dive into first, chances are you’re probably relatively new to JavaScript itself and the prospect of comparing the frameworks by actually reading their source code is perhaps more effort than you want to spend. Were I in such a position, I’d want someone to do that for me; to look at them and tell me why some choose one over the other.

So, today I’m releasing jQuery vs MooTools which aims to do just that. No doubt this will cause a stir in our communities but hopefully it will be a healthy one.

I’m not trying to convince people who love jQuery that they’re wrong and should switch, nor am I trying to illustrate to the MooTools community what they’re missing from jQuery. This site is aimed at people who are trying to make this decision and is meant to be an honest comparison of the two libraries. It’s obvious where my bias lays – I’m a MooTools supporter. But I’ve tried to represent the two libraries fairly and, where my opinion is expressed, I try and call that out and say it’s just that – my opinion.

It’s entirely likely that I’ve misrepresented something about the jQuery core library in this post but I’ve done my best not to. Before publishing this site I consulted numerous other contributors to our community. I’ve shared the comparison with authors of other frameworks, bloggers who don’t endorse any particular framework over another, and even sent it to one of the jQuery team members. As I receive feedback, I’ll update the site to incorporate the perspectives of others that may be helpful for the target audience of the comparison (i.e. people considering the two frameworks).

I encourage you to leave comments on the site itself and not here on clientcide.

read on: jQuery vs MooTools

I used to make a habbit of posting links to all the fun and interesting MooTools news and whatnot here. I’ve recently been focused on the second edition of the MooTools book, MooTools More, bugs, and a new job and have had less time to post here than usual.

To make up for this, I and other MooTools developers have been posting things on Twitter on @mootools. If you want to know what’s happening in the MooTools world, this is the place to follow. If you don’t use Twitter, you can still get the RSS of the feed.

You can also follow MooTools developers who often post useful things about MooTools that don’t make it on to @mootools (in no particular order):

• Valerio Proietti – @kamicane
• Aaron Newton (that’s me) – @anutron
• Thomas Aylott – @subtleGradient
• Guillermo Rauch – @rauchg
• Christoph Pojer – @cpojer
• Jan Kassens – @kassens
• David Walsh – @davidwalshblog
• Michelle Steigerwalt – @Yuffster

You can find more links for these developers (home pages, github profiles, etc) on the MooTools developer page.

As a side note, you can follow Clientcide on Twitter as @clientcide. I’ll note that the only thing posted there are posts to this blog, so if you’re already following Clientcide via email or rss, you won’t see anything new on twitter.

I had a nice email exchange with one of the guys on the Firebug team recently. Basically, I miss Firebug 1.2 w/ Firefox 2.0, but Firefox 3 has some features I really don’t want to live without. In our email conversation, I shared a laundry list of issues that I’ve observed Firebug 1.3 doing that make my life less awesome.

Anyway, one of the suggestions I got was to upgrade to the alpha version of Firebug 1.4 and, I gotta say, it’s worth it. It’s not quite as solid as things were back on Firefox 2, but it’s way better than Firebug 1.3.

You can grab the latest builds here: http://getfirebug.com/releases/firebug/1.4/?C=M;O=A (My Firebug friend recommends the most-recent, currently 1.4a22).