There are many Javascript libraries around ranging from purposes of animation effects to allowing easy to cook AJAX applications. Be it Prototype or Rico, SAJAX or anything else, free libraries are available for you to use, gone is the time when you needed to grind your gray cells for hours & days to get that effect or user interface up & running. But what I dislike about all these libraries is that though they get the work done, they are quite difficult to use due to the lack of proper documentation. I know documenting some library or software takes a lot of time & most of the open source projects are done by individuals etc. in their spare time, but then its not of much use to others if there’s no documentation on various aspects as how to use it.
But that might change, the wheels are in motion, as Yahoo! has entered the community with the Yahoo! User Interface Library. Available under the open source BSD License, this is a javascript library that allows you to accomplish the most common tasks of a web application’s user interface like creating calendars, sliders, colour pickers, animation effects, DOM manipulation, event handling, AJAX etc. Though still in its early stages, this library looks quite promising, since one can only imagine how bright its future will be & how far this library will go with the backing of a company like Yahoo! Another thing that this library has which others lack is documentation. This library has solid documentation with every API call, utility and control documented allowing anyone to easily put to use this cool library!! 😀