Spry framework : A less cared framework?

I wonder how many Ajax developers know about Adobe Spry? I too feel, I have ignored it for long. Everything apart, lots of question arises about a Ajax framework from Adobe. The reason? Adobe is one of the tough competitor to Ajax. With its Flex and AIR technology to build RIA, they are still ahead in RIA technology. Still in prerelease, Spry offers a way to incorporate XML, JSON or HTML data into pages using HTML, CSS, and a minimal amount of JavaScript. Lets have a look at this framework and unearth its pros and cons.

Spry claims to be "Ajax for Everyone". It provides a set of easy to implement set of widgets, effects and data handlers. The main advantage is each component in the framework can be used independently of one another. So, developers need only to include what they need! Other frameworks have lots of files and folder structure to implement widgets like accordion, tabbed panels etc. The major disadvantage of these hierarchical and dependency oriented frameworks are:

• The framework becomes big and complex.
• To implement a single feature, you require to host the entire framework.
• Implementing a small feature might have a big learning curve.
• Difficult to deploy the framework in a restrictive environment.

Spry framework is the solution to all these plus other advantages. It makes implementing features to the existing web pages very easy. The widgets created into the HTML tags and the framework do not create its own tags. This increases debugging capabilities and readability of the displayed HTML. Dojo toolkit also uses the same methodology to embed widgets. But Spry takes things further to reduce the amount of Java script involved. Advantages does not end here. Each widget is coded independent and developers need to include only the widget files he is going to use. Developer has to use the appropriate CSS and JS files. All he has to do is copy these files to his existing web site folder structure, link them from the page and all the code.

Another advantage with Spry is its ability to work in restrictive environment. Let me explain a restrictive environment. Lets assume I need a accordion in my blog which is hosted on blogger. I am going to host my external java script files in google pages and not any file sharing service available on web; the reason - many corporates blocks these sites and if I host my external files, I am guaranteed of getting my blog messed up for some users. And adding accordion can be made possible by keeping Spry files in google pages and using it in my blog. I will soon demonstrate this feature on my blog.

So why is Spry not so popular? The main reason for this could be Adobe's RIA technology using Flex and AIR. You will also notice that they have not given much UI effects to the widgets in the Spry framework. So, Flex technology itself is shadowing Spry. But Spry can be very helpful when developers need only certain functionality in their web page or application. So if you are an web developer looking to add some features to your pages, have a look at Spry framework!