Re:Response to John Resig’s comments about YUI
by kaylarose on Wednesday November 10, 2010 @11:56AM
(#1890963)
That's exactly my experience as well. I recently worked on two "enterprise rich web apps"(I hate that term) that were desktop-like.
App A: the UI was mostly composed of HTML glued together with JQuery components, with a custom Model/Controller implementation (similar to Backbone.js) for the data. The view did have a lot of glue, but the data separation ended up a lot cleaner, and was easier for designers to maintain (HTML/CSS).
App B: Was taken over from another team that used ExtJS. App B, had full UI without much effort, but ended up with a lot more cruft and direct view/model dependencies.
Plus the ExtJS documentation is terrible.
However, most of the YUI-based stuff I've seen struck me as overly complex and slow and heavyweight, like Ext/JS. If you want to build something that looks and feels like a desktop app those libraries are probably the right choice but I almost always prefer something lighter and cleaner in a web UI.