Choose jQuery or MooTools Javascript Framework?

Most people getting started with JavaScript these days are faced with the challenging task of picking a library to use, or at least which one to learn first. Aaron Newton of Clientcide saw numerous posts that boil down to “MooTools or jQuery?”

He has published “jQuery vs MooTools” aims to help you make that choice. He tried to highlight the differences in philosophies between the two codebases and highlight their advantages and disadvantages.

jQuery focuses on expressiveness, quick and easy coding, and the DOM while MooTools focuses on extension, inheritance, legibility, reuse, and maintainability. jQuery is easy to get started and see quick results but can turn into code that’s harder to reuse and maintain, while MooTools takes longer to learn and requires you to write more code upfront before you see results, but afterwards is more reusable and more maintainable.

Both frameworks keep their cores rather lean, leaving it to you and others to write plug-ins and extensions. MooTools takes a more holistic approach and gives you tools to write anything you can imagine beyond the scope of the DOM, but pays the price by having a steeper learning curve.

MooTools extensibility and holistic approach gives you a superset of jQuery’s features, but jQuery’s focus on a slick DOM API doesn’t preclude you from using the native inheritance methods of JavaScript or from using a class system like MooTools if you want it.

Do you think so? Which framework do you choose?

Source: jQuery vs MooTools