jQuery vs MooTools: The Learning Curve and The Community

First, jQuery is, by and large, easier to learn. It has an almost colloquial style that almost doesn’t feel like programming. If all you want is to get something working quickly without learning JavaScript, jQuery is probably a better choice for you. It’s not that MooTools can’t help you accomplish the same things, but I’ll admit that MooTools can be a little harder to get the hang of if you’re new to JavaScript and also that there are just a lot of resources out there to help you learn jQuery – more than there are for MooTools at least.

If you compare the jQuery community (see the “Discussion” page on jQuery) and the MooTools community (irc, mailing list, and unofficial forum) you’ll quickly discover two things: 1) the jQuery community is far larger (I attribute this mostly to the point I made above about how easy it is to learn, but also because…) and 2) they are more active in promoting the library. If you measure jQuery and MooTools on metrics like the number of people using it, the number of search queries run on Google, the number of books sold, etc, you’ll see jQuery is ahead by a wide margin.

To tell you why you might consider MooTools I’ll first need to talk a little bit about what both the frameworks do. Ultimately which framework you choose is going to come down to what you want to accomplish and how you like to program (and maybe even if you like to program, at least in JavaScript).

Category: javaScript
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