My Experience With Frameworks

As you may be able to tell from my own Proficiency scores, I don't have a high opinion of my own capability with Javascript libraries or frameworks. It's because I don't have a great deal of experience with them. As you can see in the Javascript section of the Code pages, most of my experience is with Core Javascript, the regular Javascript I learned in the 1990s and have used nearly everyday since then.

My experience with Javascript frameworks is slight and uneven. Dojo, for instance, is a framework I dealt with at AOL.My first Dojo task was to find out what was wrong with a Dojo calendar plug-in. I found out, all right. It didn't used AJAX to bring in the date. As a result, it could only deal with toy-sized calendars. I tossed all that Dojo code and substituted it with Core Javascript that used AJAX to bring in the data. Instead of trying to load in hundreds of records for the whole coming year, I loaded in only the dozen records actually neeeded as each month was presented. Amazingly, it seemed an awful lot faster all the sudden.

Over the years, I have had to crate my own frameworks and Content Management Systems when they didn't alreadt exist or the company would refuse the high price of an existing solution. once I created a form-building capabiluty because I wasn't satisfied with an existing solution. Much of my biggest successses have been to find a solution where one didn't exist before. That's the big advantage of my experience.

So if you need a jQuery guru, I'm not your guy. jQuery doesn't impress me. It's known mostly by Java programmers who are too lazy to learn Javascript (or guys who call themselves Javascript programmers who are too lazy to learn Javascript). Remember that you can't use jQuery without Javascript, but you can't do it the other way around.