Why I Prefer MooTools over jQuery

This post has been updated at 10/07/2011.

I don't understand the hype behind jQuery, why is everyone so excited about it. I'm not. Let's go through the typical jQuery marketing bollocks(TM):

I don't understand the hype behind jQuery, why is everyone so excited about it. I'm not. Let's go through the typical jQuery marketing bollocks(TM):

Oh, it's so chainable! So other frameworks are. Well jQuery is more chainable than others since it returns still the same thing, and you can work just with this one thing anyway, but what? Of course it's trade-off, but let's talk about it later. And who's chaining 20 method calls anyway? If you do so, you should try some other profession than software development, seriously ...

Oh, it's so unobtrusive! No fucking extending of built-in prototypes, wow, that's really cool! Yeah but it basically means you have everything in one namespace (the jQuery function), which means it's quite a mess, and also you aren't working with JS anymore, you're using just this one function and you can't use the JS built-ins because you are typically using with the jQuery object rather than just an element. Of course you can access it, but to have half of code in JS and half of code in jQuery, it's just a mess.

So please guys don't tell me that jQuery is more JS-way, it isn't! With MooTools I'm still using JS, there is just more functions and classes, that's it. Yes, MooTools provides mechanism for writing standard class inheritance and it certainly isn't very JS way, but it's still better than one object which re-implements all the JS functionality.

What's Not So Great About jQuery

I've been working on some projects with jQuery and my experience is: jQuery itself isn't enough not even for the simplest sites. Even for the smallest ones you need quite a lot of plugins for stuff like AJAX forms etc, but I don't really want to waste my time looking for this basic stuff which I need all the time, I need to get things working. In MooTools I have all the stuff I need and if there is something I don't like, I can simple build my own custom MooTools via the MooTools-Core Builder resp. MooTools-More Builder.

Very often I've seen that jQuery is just too simple: it's trying to be easy even for designers (no offence), but it means it's hard for developers in case they need some complex stuff.

So yeah jQuery can help you to learn JS, but I don't think it's that great for real-world projects.