In my quest for finding the perfect Rich Web UI framework, I’ve come across quite a set. I just want to list them here, hope it’s useful for someone.

Open source

• Prototype & Scripaculous – General purpose framework, some Widgets.
• MochiKit – Some Widgets
• dojo – Lots of Widgets, feels heavyweight – pretty cool nonetheless!
• YUI – Yahoo! UI Library – Lots of Widgets

Commercial

• Backbase – Feels very heavyweight – but very cool!

There may will be more, decide for yourself!

As I’m using Ruby on Rails and I very much appreciate the object-oriented nature of Prototype and Scriptaculous I chose to go with those two. And though Widgets or Controls (I prefer Widgets) are not always bundled on one page together, there are numerous widgets for these two. Whilst searching for widgets for Prototype and Scriptaculous I’ve found:

• ToolTip – Shows tooltips over any element
• Accordian – M$ Outlook like accordian’s
• Spinner – Allows you to increase/decrease values with arrows.
• Window/Dialog – Put windows and dialog’s in your pages.

The author of the Accordian, Greg Neustaetter, created a very helpful tutorial on how to create Widgets with Prototype/Scriptaculous. I in the meantime created a widget for creating data-driven tables and I’m busy with context-sensitive menu’s. I’ll publish them when they’re good enough for it.

What I like very much about the BackBase approach is that they use special tags within the HTML to create these widgets. They are replaced in runtime with the actual HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This allows for an MVC type of programming and makes the whole more maintainable. I believe they are doing something very similar in Zope3 lab For example take a look at their tooltip implementation The idea is that they use little JSON data islands. A nice article about this can be found here