Robert Nyman has announced the release of version 2.5 of his Dom Assistant framework. A light in size (6 kb gziped) but fully featured tool for streamlining Javascript development. He states in his announcement that:

“With this release of DOMAssistant, I feel that it can seriously compete with the major JavaScript libraries on the market.”

Although Mochikit, Prototype, Mootools, jQuery, YUI, Spry et. al. seem to indicate that the market for Open Source JS frameworks is a bit saturated. I’ve found that different projects frequently call for a different toolkit. Sometimes, the rich widgets & CDN’s of frameworks like YUI & Dojo make all the difference in delivery & performance. Sometimes the Dreamweaver & Coldfusion integration of Spry makes it a no brainer. Sometimes you need Mootool’s Flash, jQuery’s progressive enhancement or Prototype’s Ruby on Rails integration & extensibility. Dom Assistant is definitely another toolkit that fits into this ecosystem.

Dom Assitant’s Strengths:

Small Size:

At only 21KB compressed for the entire library, it’s small enough for just about any bandwidth constraint.

Legible Code:

Unlike frameworks that make extensive use of $, $$ or chaining. Dom Assistant based code is highly legible and approachable. Even for someone new to JS development. It does use the $ operator for selector support, but doesn’t encourage the development of long chains.

Rich Features:

Dom Assistant is fully featured toolkit for Ajax, Dom, CSS & Event manipulation.

Great Performance:

Dom Assistant is engineered to avoid memory leaks and run fast.

Drawbacks:

Dom Assistant currently lacks any widget or animation support.

You can find Dom Assistant here:

http://www.robertnyman.com/domassistant/

Read More About Dom Assistant here:

Robert Nyman Blog Post

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