Is it worth the time to switch from AjaxControlToolkit to jQuery?

Question

I keep hearing all these things about how awesome jQuery is and how the AjaxControlToolkit sucks. Unfortunately, I only heard about this after I built my entire WebForms site using the toolkit.

Now I am considering switching, if not entirely, mostly to jQuery. This is partially for the experience (having never coded in Javascript or used any frameworks) and partially because I think I have more control over jQuery.

There is no pressing need to switch, but I'm considering doing it anyway.

Is it worth tackling the learning curve for jQuery just to get the experience, of should I leave my working site well enough alone?

Answer 1

jQuery definitely gives your more flexibility, but it really depends on what functionality you need.

While jQuery is quite addictive to use, the jQueryUI control library is quite minimalistic. Though there are many awesome plugins for jQuery, the look-and-feel of those are inherently inconsistent. On contrary, the nice thing about using UI controls from a single vendor is that you get everything look and behave consistently which also makes the site appear more professional.

I never used AjaxControlToolkit, but I believe you should be able to include jQuery to the page. Nowadays these great frameworks are quite friendly to each other. That way you can get the best out of both worlds. It also reduces the amount of work you have to do during the "switch", and offers a more graduated transition from one to another.

Answer 2

I would just use both jQuery and AjaxControlToolkit. I am doing this now. All in all, they play pretty nice with each other. Just be aware that when Toolkit does an AJAX postback, jQuery doesn't know it, so you have to chain both the document load and the onpostback events.

Answer 3

From recent experience, I am thinking of switching from AjaxControlToolkit to Jquery completely. This is due to an incident, where we tried to host a new application in a virtual directory of an older application.

The older application was running System.Web.Extensions version 1.06, but the newer application needed version 3.5 (for AjaxControlToolkit 3.5). Due to the way IIS is structured, it would inherit the parent's web.config file, causing all sorts of problems and errors because the application would be finding TWO versions of system.web.extensions. This issue was not solved and we had to host the webapp under a new subdomain.

This problem could of been avoided, if we had just used jQuery, since it is completely decoupled from IIS.

Answer 4

Would I use ACT? Would I write a main method with 6K lines of code? No.. Drag a cascading control on your page, look at the JS code now. Ask yourself is it worth changing to jQuery?