Drag and drop: jQuery UI or Scriptaculous?

Question

Dear all,

I am in the middle of the road whether to use jQuery UI or Scriptaculous for drag and drop. I am using Ruby on Rails, and Scriptaculous support in Ruby on Rails is superb with the existence of scriptaculous_helper.rb. But I have already use jQuery for the ajax and DOM manipulation. I do not mind to use scriptaculous since we can use jQuery.noConflict() in the code. I also kind of get the impression that scriptaculous drag and drop is better than jQuery UI drag and drop based on the online demos.

So back to the original question, which one would you recommend as a drag and drop library and which one do you think is better than the other? Scriptaculous or jQuery UI?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a definite answer for this. It depends on what exactly you want to do, and what your personal preference is. I personally found it easier to work with protoytype/scripaculous than with jquery in the particular things I wanted to do where a little easier to do with it than with jquery. However, your and preference might be different.

Answer 2

I would recommend jQuery UI Drag n Drop since it is becoming a standard in web development. It also is a really extendable model and very easy to add custom event handlers, and proxy elements during the drag.

I would also keep in mind how much more jQuery UI has to offer that you might soon want to take advantage of like:

• Animation
• Easing
• UI widgets
• Themes

Another critical point to make in the decision is how many libraries do you want to link-in. Using two libraries is common, but it also comes with alot of redundant code. I would recommend fully going to one library so that you can have minimal download of client-script. In my optinion, jQuery has more to offer so I would recommend moving to it, not to mention all the free plugins.

Of course this is just my opinion and I think Scriptculous is a viable option too.

Answer 3

I personally prefer jQuery. However, i would say use whichever one you actually prefer, but use that one library only. While you can use both at the same time it doesnt make sense to pick and choose components from both as it will most likely lead to a mess at some point :-)