In order for you to understand our point of view, we've made a graph, showing some of the most well known JS framework available:
Archetype is designed to fill the gap that all these frameworks and libraries leaves in the Javascript: Structure and ease of development.
Most of the frameworks available provides at least one of this things:
When you work on the server side, you have plenty of frameworks to help you designing your application with a good structure, separating the view, the controller, the model, the front, the middle, and the back of your application. This ables you to have a more readable code, good practices, flexibility and efficiency in your work.
However, on the client side, there aren't all those kind of frameworks, and thus, JavaScript programming is a real pain.
Archetype is designed to fill these gaps on the clientside, in order for you to work in a good manner, with a lot of reusability.
Archetype stay on the shoulders of a giant, which is Prototype . This frameworks helps a lot in JS development, providing really good features to Javascript in a navigator environnement. For us, if we were in a "Java" world, Prototype would be "java.lang" so nothing but what's needed to really start doing anything.
So with a few code (Archetype, itself, is really light), we can obtain something really usable on the clientside. Archetype is quite young, but quite stable too, the 0.x version means that we think there are some little bugs (see http://bug.archetypejs.org ), but it's a very good way to prototypize any "Web 2.0" clientside project, and it starts to be used in some big projects.
A little independant private study (involving about 20 developers) has noted that the framework is at least as useful as Dojo! Whereas Dojo provides a lot of predefined Widgets, some good helpers, etc. we just provide structure to create your own widgets easily. As programmation is not widget (have you seen a lot of pre-made widgets on the server side ? Does it do all the code of your app ?), our framework is very efficient and is very useful with only a "few" lines of code. But don't forget, there is no major problem to using both Dojo and Archetype, so you have the full "spectrum" covered.
We just don't try to reinvent the wheel, and we just take the "good ideas" we've seen in different environments (from serverside to clientside).
