How do you keep up with all the web frameworks?

Question

MooTools/Cappuccino/SproutCore/Django/RubyOnRails/Pylons/jQuery/etc

Help, too many buzzwords out there.

I spend more time reading about them than actually having time to learn and use them...what to do?

Answer 1

My co-workers and I have found Mootools and JQuery especially helpful. I would recommend looking into those two

Answer 2

Pick a particular technology stack and learn it. If you want to do web development choose Django or Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET MVC rather than trying to learn about all of them.

Answer 3

Well, you can pick one (or two) and become an expert at it. Many of them are similar enough that you won't be completely lost if you have to switch. MooTools, JQuery, Prototype, etc. are all JavaScript libraries. I know Prototype pretty well, but JQuery isn't too rough to hop into.

Same goes for the MVC frameworks you listed (Django, Pylons, Rails). The concepts are very similar, just some syntactical differences. Again, I'm most familiar with Pylons, but I can understand Django, Rails, and ASP.NET MVC well enough.

Answer 4

These existing questions might help you work out your answer.

• What Javascript Library
• What Web Framework

There's no strict answer to these things, try to think about your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, and what is called for by your job and see what would suit it best.

Answer 5

Well, in my opinion the two biggest frameworks outthere are Mootools and jQuery.

I've seen jQuery and it's designed to be easy, and it focuses on animations, it's commiunity is really close and the number of plugins availible is amazing.

Mootools is more sophisticated, I believe it to be more powerful and robust, if your goal is to develop advanced apps, I'd suggest you mootools.

Speed is another subject , You can test their speed here

http://slicktest.perrohunter.com/

Cheers ! (go with mootools ;) )

Answer 6

I think the other answer to this question is to learn the foundations that make up the frameworks. The reasons and ideas behind them, rather than the syntax and such.

As has been said Djanho, Pylon, and Rails are all based on the MVC pattern. So if you know how the MVC pattern works, then all you are looking at is three different implementations of the same concept.

So I think it is important to look into the foundations of the frameworks. If you know why, and how, the framework is built then you will be able to jump around the various frameworks without too much difficulty.

Picking one or two to concentrate on is probably a good answer as well.