Fat Agnus

If you have been a .NET developer for a while then you have probably heard about companies like Telerik and ComponentArt. Both of the companies sell .NET controls that seemingly make it easy to get Ajax functionality implemented into your applications.

I have had the “pleasure” of working with controls from both of the companies and I must say, even though it seems like a great idea, it isn`t. It will give you something fast that you can show off to a client or whatever, but in the long run, they suck.

Basically, they are just poorly written and perform really badly, compared to a lot of the Opensource Javascript frameworks that exists today. I once had a boss that really had high thoughts about them, he also liked MS Ajax.net and in generally, he wasn`t to keen on Javascript, however he is a very good developer and knows his stuff. After a long period of time he started to change his mind, which for me is a good indication of just how bad they suck.

I have another friend, whom I used to work with, which also have had the pleasure of working with the controls and he was a real Javascript savvy. He used to complain about the pain the controls gave him and he was the one who got me hooked on javascript and many of the frameworks that exists today.

So the conclusion is that, if you want javascript that performs well, give you full control of what is going on and maybe just need some javascript magic tricks to your site, then I would recommend that you check out some of the following in this blogpost.

Good collection of javascript frameworks

You might need to work a little more to implement the functionality, but I think that the benefits are greater then the “downside“.