jQuery UI vs. Scriptaculous?

Question

Which is better for UI development. Are there any differences between the two UI toolkits?

Answer 1

I currently use Prototype/Scriptaculous, but I'm looking to migrate to jQuery. My main reason is that the developers and community behind Prototype/Scriptaculous seem to have disappeared; there haven't been any new releases in a long time, and several features are still a little buggy. The jQuery & jQuery UI teams seem to be very engaged, more open (see this, for example), and have a larger and more active community.

Answer 2

jQuery is better,

1. it has noConflict method that allows you to easy migrate, having both prototype/scriptaculous and jquery library included

2. jQuery is light weight especially in compare with scriptaculous

3. jQuery produce very simple code that easy to test/review

4. jQuery support CSS 2/3 selectors even browser doesn't

5. For ROR there is a plugin jRails

Regards, Pavel

Answer 3

JQuery will be supported in Visual Studio 2010 making it a good choice for .NET developers.

Check this link - jQuery and Microsoft

Answer 4

See comparison of features: http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/javascript-libraries

jQuery is very popular and well integrated in many frameworks, while the only framework in which scriptaculous is integrated is Ruby on Rails.

Answer 5

I just migrated all my client side scripting from Prototype / Scriptaculous to jQuery. The result is better performance (less coding + smaller footprint) and the application as a whole seems much richer. There is something really satisfying about jQuery development.

Prototype is a great library, but I got a little frustrated that, as DNS pointed out, the developers & community seem to have gone to sleep.

Answer 6

hmmm I find that scriptaculous is easier to use then JQ because it looks more like javascript and it has more core effects...I like that about it however yes it is a bit buggy and the comunity has started to move to JQuery...However I realy don't like JQ because it is like learning a new lanuage from scratch...it looks nothing like javascript

Answer 7

I've been using jQuery whenever I can. When using scriptaculous, I've found it hard to find suitable plugins that just work. Most of them have bugs or lack good documentation. For example, I went through 3 slideshows including writing my own in Scriptaculous before settling in and modifying one to suit my needs. With jQuery, I just had to go through 1 slideshow plugin because there are so many of them that one was bound to suit my needs.