Tyler left a comment on one of my early blog posts, Mootools is not dead. His comment follows:
What would you say about this now? I agree with the subtext suggested by the authors of your excerpted posts. There has been an undercurrent in the MooTools-o-sphere for more than a year now: that developers’ insolence leaves the community with much to be desired.
The framework itself is an enigma. How else could you classify something proven to be so powerful, attractive, and yet mesmerizing to those who gaze upon it?
The undercurrent continues to flow, and MooTools momentum has reached a standstill. The various community services (lighthouse, github, google groups, mootools docs, mootools forums, blog, mootorial) have been disbanded or relocated into a dysfunctional, confusing, quagmire. Followers couldn’t help but scratch their collective heads, and newcomers aren’t given the indicators they might need to adopt.
Surely by now, most of the people who have developed a project with MooTools (such as I) have asked themselves, “How much longer do I have to keep asking myself ‘Is MooTools the solution on which I should standardize’?”
And I should add, my play with interrogative in the language of that statement is intentional. I have been reluctant to let MooTools go, though every inch of my being says it has little hope.
(emphasis mine)
You can read my reply to his comment in that post, but in this post, I’d like to ask something else.
I want to know what people think of the State of the Mootools. My feelings shift often. I wrote a new edition of the mooWalkthrough; I love moo that much. Other days, I wonder where it’s heading and where to find things. Where is everyone? While we don’t need a super leader, we do need someone to give us regular mootoolers some direction. More than what the core team has done so far.
What are your feelings on the direction of Mootools? The community, the library and the current feeling that Mootools gives off? Do you ask the same question as Tyler?
Possibly related posts:
The direction of MooTools is, as always, moving onward and upward. Though Lighthouse shows a massive number of unattended tickets, there’s plenty of development going on behind the scenes. I grow more excited about Moo every day!
[...] a post over on Ryan Rampersand’s blog today entitled “State of the MooTools” wherein he responds to a comment left on an earlier post he made (MooTools is not dead) and [...]
Glad to hear David say that. As MooTools has been the library I have taken to learning. I would be sad if were to become a dead duck.
I love minimalistic frameworks that only give me the basic building blocks to let me create something myself, and because of this, I still think MooTools is the best for me.
I try to read up on other frameworks to compare them with MooTools, but everytime I do it I end up looking at a feature of the other frameworks, and then think “Nah I’m good with MooTools”.
A few years back, when these frameworks were novel, comparing them was just a comparison of their quality. None had a clear future, so they weighed alike on the scales, in terms of whether they would still exist a few years on. MooTools did well under these terms.
Now, though, these frameworks have graduated from being interesting to being almost essential. It takes a while to learn one, and after you choose one, it permeates all your client-side code. So the safety of a framework’s future is now as important in the comparison as its quality. Prototype and somehow jQuery have managed to give the impression of that safety, but MooTools hasn’t. Even if it does have a safe future, the impression matters more than the reality.
[...] and official repository of plugins and other resources. Unfortunately MooTools have so far failed to provide this platform; leaving its resources scattered and developers on their [...]
I’ve been using mootools for a couple years now. There’s been a few occurrences where I’ve had to work with other frameworks, like jQuery, and I’ve yet to ever find one comparable to mootools.
I think the audience that the framework targets is much more developer oriented, so while toolkits like jQuery have official repositories and community sites, mootools doesn’t really need these things (though in the interest of attracting a larger audience they might).
One also has to keep in mind the only framework that seems to actively advertise itself is jQuery (and from what I’ve ready they make a habit of omitting certain details).