Prototype is just one big hack, whose purpose is to make translation from Ruby to JS easier. That's why it's not well maintained by its creators, nor is it going to get the refactoring that it sorely needs to be a "good" stand-alone library.
Dojo, simply put, is overly complex and poorly documented. Also, when some/all of the "RIA" pieces are included, it slows to a crawl. The reason why efficiency is a non-priority to Dojo is that Alex Russell's philosophy is that hardware will eventually catch up.
As for my favorites, jQuery is by far the easiest to use. Everyone who gives it an honest shot finds that it's faster to develop in, because it just makes sense and is well-factored. And YUI, while it is complex almost to the level of Dojo (and, clearly written by programmers attuned to thinking in Java), it is the most well-documented of all the libraries. If you really need to know how to use a piece of it, there will be an example, and there will be a fully described API listing, with some explanations to go with it.
One thing that I will say, though, is that over the past two years or so, the libraries have borrowed ideas from one another, and have prompted their maintainers to fill in each other's gaps through friendly competition. For example: If it wasn't for jQuery having the first great element selector, the other libraries wouldn't have written their own good ones. Now, they're comparing the relative speeds of their selection engines - but they all have one, including Ext.
Perhaps I should try putting together demos of things using the libraries that you're "throwing away". If I ever get the time... :)
Well, I'm really disappointed by the results.
Prototype is just one big hack, whose purpose is to make translation from Ruby to JS easier. That's why it's not well maintained by its creators, nor is it going to get the refactoring that it sorely needs to be a "good" stand-alone library.
Dojo, simply put, is overly complex and poorly documented. Also, when some/all of the "RIA" pieces are included, it slows to a crawl. The reason why efficiency is a non-priority to Dojo is that Alex Russell's philosophy is that hardware will eventually catch up.
As for my favorites, jQuery is by far the easiest to use. Everyone who gives it an honest shot finds that it's faster to develop in, because it just makes sense and is well-factored. And YUI, while it is complex almost to the level of Dojo (and, clearly written by programmers attuned to thinking in Java), it is the most well-documented of all the libraries. If you really need to know how to use a piece of it, there will be an example, and there will be a fully described API listing, with some explanations to go with it.
One thing that I will say, though, is that over the past two years or so, the libraries have borrowed ideas from one another, and have prompted their maintainers to fill in each other's gaps through friendly competition. For example: If it wasn't for jQuery having the first great element selector, the other libraries wouldn't have written their own good ones. Now, they're comparing the relative speeds of their selection engines - but they all have one, including Ext.
Perhaps I should try putting together demos of things using the libraries that you're "throwing away". If I ever get the time... :)