What does Google Closure Library offer over jQuery?

registered · Posted: Wed May 23, 2012 10:00 am

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More than another JS lib

As I understand it, Google Closure is not only another JS library, but it is also a set of tools that will allow you to optimize your JS code. Working with jQuery gives you good tools and a lightweight library, but it does not minify your own code. The Closure compiler will. The closure inspector may also be useful, as sometimes minified code has a different behavior than the original one, and is a pain to debug. It integrates with Firebug and support unit tests, which are both developers' best friends nowadays.

Documentation and Extensions

I guess that as any new library VS a well established one, it will lack the availability of tons of extensions and tutorial that jQuery has. However, being pushed by Google should ensure that support and reliability will be both pretty good. The current documentation and tutorial both seem really good, too.

Features

The features of Closure look decent, though, and its modular architecture is promising, too. I guess Google has been using it internally for a long time, which means that you could expect all basic features (and more) to be implemented, and probably in a very optimized and scalable way. They are trying to present it as the STL of JavaScript, so they should have polished it.

After looking at the features more closely, it seems that this may be a step forward for web-applications development compared to existing libraries as jQuery. It guess it benefits internal developments at Google, but things like detecting the online state (see goog.events.OnlineHandler), easy integration of AJAX requests and JS actions in the browser history (see goog.History), or the legions of great widgets they provide (see goog.ui package) may help all of us building even more awesome webapps Wink

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It comes with templates features that integrates with Java (who said GWT ?), so this may also be another plus for Closure.

Ease of use

Finally, it looks pretty simple to use. The syntax may be a bit more verbose than the short $ jQuery function, but with IDEs and auto-completion, it's not a real problem. Moreover, I'd say we can expect a good integration in IDEs like Eclipse, coming from Google.

Google Closure Compiler
Reducing the size of your JavaScript code with Google Closure Compiler will give your site a huge speed boost
Bandwidth and browser technology are improving to meet the demands of highly JavaScripted applications, but you still need to be concerned with the size of your JavaScript code.

There are two main reasons why size is important. First, even if the JavaScript you serve is cached, it still needs to be evaluated by the browser on every request. While other loading actions, such as downloading assets, can be run in parallel, JavaScript evaluation can’t. This means that the size of your JavaScript files will have a larger impact on page load time than the size of CSS files or images. Reducing the size of your JavaScript is the only way to reduce the amount of time the browser spends evaluating it.

References

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registered · Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 9:05 am

Thank you for this excellent review. Even if pushed by Google, jQuery will be around for a very long time. But I just love having competition in the marketplace as it will only push jQuery and extension developers to produce even better solutions! Smile