Is it too late for Adobe's Spry AJAX Framework?
I'm on a redesign project for a site that I built in 2007. The site uses the Adobe Spry Framework for dynamic menus. The problem is the redesign is centered not left justified and the dynamic menus appear to the left of my design when "hidden". I assume this is a bug. The div's should be hidden not moved to the left.
Anyhow, I thought I'd visit Adobe Labs and download the newest version of the Spry Framework. Who knows this might be a bug that has been corrected. Nope I've got the latest version 1.6.1.
The Spry Team blog last post was December 2008.
Spry's homepage talks about integration with CS3 (what about CS4 which was released in Sept 2008)
What was my solution? I've switched to JQuery. There seems to be a Tsunami of support for JQuery at this moment. It's become the defacto standard AJAX framework. While I've only dabbled with it, I'm ready to dive into JQuery.
Not to fault Adobe, Spry was always a "Labs" project. They bundled it with many of their products, but it hasn't matured. Often the cost of technology is NOT the out of pocket, but the time spent learning the technology and replacing the technology on a project when the technology is neglected.
My suggestion. Adobe, set Spry free. Take it open source. Perhaps the community could lead future development.
It's not as easy as Adobe would have liked us to believe. Sure, integration into some of the Adobe tools made it easy to drop in par-baked solutions, but trying to get more complex functionality comparable to other AJAX frameworks became clumsy.
The documentation is just bad. If a senior developer has difficulty figuring out how to accomplish simple tasks then junior developers, and their intended audience, designers, simply aren't going to use it.
jQuery is the bees knees. It has great support, it's relatively easy to use, and it's well documented. Should Adobe open source Spry? Maybe. Will it make a difference? In my opinion, no. Spry is dead, and Adobe should adopt jQuery (or another well know, open source framework) and support that effort.
Sending you an email now with a good resource