Sinking My Teeth Into ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2

I’ve been shopping around for a general-purpose JavaScript framework for a while now. There’s so much writing document.getElementById by hand you can do before it gets annoying. I’ve looked at Dojo, Prototype, Mootools, JQuery, Yahoo! User Interface Library and I forget what else. Atlas was on the very bottom of my list. I looked at the early bits, but wasn’t impressed.

Fast forward to ScottGu’s announcement of ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 Release (no “foundation” or federation” in the name?):

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta2: This is the “core” ASP.NET AJAX download and contains the features that will be fully supported in the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release (meaning Microsoft product support is standing by 24x7). The download includes support for the core client-side JavaScript type-system, networking stack, component model, extender base classes, and the server-side functionality to integrate within ASP.NET.

Now, “the core client-side JavaScript type-system” caught my attention.

<digression>I don’t care for the stock Ajax-powered server controls because I know from experience they are insufficient for sophisticated UIs. Either you read 30+ tutorials about how to bind a DataGrid and then have yourself a headache maintaining the code for several years, or you buy a mature suite of components from an ISV and work with them. We’ve been using Telerik’s products that saved us a ton of time. Besides, they were the first vendor to support Atlas in their line of products.</digression>

I downloaded beta 2 and—whoa!—look at all that code! I browsed through the “core” file (MicrosoftAjax.js) and found a ton of useful stuff. Hey, it’s only 6,070 lines of code!: )

Prototype has been my favorite until now, but I’ve never been comfortable with the syntax of declaring and extending classes. Besides, the practice of Array as an associative array leads to trouble. There seems to be a consensus now that Object, not Array, should be used for that purpose (see JavaScript “Associative Arrays” Considered Harmful).

The “core” is available as a stand-alone distro (look for a Microsoft AJAX Library link). It includes “resource strings” so you don’t need an official Ajax assembly, and ships with a bunch of JavaScript includes for locale-aware operations (client-side CultureInfo, if you will).

I quickly looked through the Quick Starts but they are outdated. Recent changes are outlined in this whitepaper. You knew this was coming if you followed Bertrand’s posts From closures to prototypes part1 and part 2.

Up-to-date documentation is scarce so I’m relying on Aptana and its life-saving Outline view, as well as a debugger to hack my way around Atlas. Expect a couple of posts soon.