jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library today. It’s used on hundreds of thousands of websites, and yet it’s not the only library JavaScript developers use. In fact, thousands of JavaScript libraries and utilities are available, and each one can typically be categorized into two groups: general and specialty.

The aim of general frameworks is to balance the differences between browsers by creating a new, unified API to perform general tasks like DOM manipulation and Ajax functionality (jQuery is a general framework). Specialty frameworks, on the other hand, focus on a specific ability, such as feature detection. So identify what it is you want to achieve and choose a framework based on that. For example, if you wanted to perform animations and only animations, the script.aculo.us framework (http://script.aculo.us/) could be a good choice for you.

This chapter looks at both general and specific frameworks. When deciding ...

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