Which JavaScript framework is generally used for high performance websites?

Question

There are different JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Dojo, mooTools, Google Web Toolkit(GWT), YUI, etc. Which one from this is suitable for high performance websites?

Answer 1

Well - as an example stackoverflow relies on jQuery ( and uses the google apis link ) - it's one of the speediest and most popular libraries and not only that but I'd say it's the easiest to use. What type of behavior are you going to have on the site? It really all depends on your needs.

Answer 2

Quite simply: all of them.

All frameworks have been built in order to provide the fastest performance possible and provide the developers with useful functions and tools. Your choice should be based on your requirements.

JavaScript runs on the client-side, so none will affect your server performance. The only difference server-side is the amount of bandwidth used to transfer the .js files to the client.

I'm personally fond of MooTools because it answers my requirements and also sticks to my coding ideals. A lot of people adopted jQuery (I personally don't like it, doesn't mean it's not great). I haven't used the other ones.

But none is better than the other, it's all a question of requirements and personal preference.

Answer 3

The answer, as always, is: it depends. What kind of performance are you talking about? Download speed? Use a minimiser and there's probably not a lot of difference. Or client-side performance, and what are you doing with it?

But, I would suggest that if you're after raw performance, I would not use a framework at all, and create low level javascript that will be far more difficult to maintain.

Some good information can be found on the YUI site.

Answer 4

I do not really think it makes a bit of difference. The big ones seem to use a mixture of Jquery & prototype along with others.

Quite frankly, it makes no difference what you use for heavily visited websites as we are talking about client technologies. After the file is loaded, there are not really any overheads. So, if you just want to do one simple thing and multiple frameworks support it, use whatever one has the smaller file size (of course, if it performs really bad, use another!)

This being said, google hosts a lot of the frameworks, so even this is really a non issue. I use Jquery hosted by Google and am very happy.

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlibs/

Backend and what the server should be using is a whole different question where you will get a thousand different answers!

Answer 5

As other answers already explained, the framework's not going to be the bottleneck in your site's performance -- rather, many other factors are. If you use popular frameworks and load them from popular URLs for them (e.g. AOL's or Google's) they're likely to be cached in your users' browsers, so you don't have to worry much about that, either.

If you care at all about performance, however, absolutely DO check out Steve Souders; work -- including both of his books, "High Performance Web Sites" and "Even Faster Web Sites".

I'm biased, as Steve is a friend and a colleague (and we share publishers as well), but I praised and admired his work even before we met in person and became colleagues -- I'm mostly a back-end person, as he used to be, so I just can't help admire somebody who, coming from the same background, had the integrity and courage to switch almost entirely to front-end focus as he realized THAT was by far the bottleneck for user-perceived performance (i.e., somebody who had the gumption to put user experience first, something we all pay homage to, of course, but don't always practice, when that "overriding priority" gets in the way of our own professional specialties, interests and skills...).