Last Published: 01 January 2010
| Version: 0.10.2-SNAPSHOT
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:
All of this is very useful, but almost none of these frameworks are designed to help making a good clientside app.
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 is build as a second level Framework, it needs an "engine" Framework to work. First based on Prototype , now, Archetype can work on top of differents Framework thanks to an abstract engine abstraction. Currently you can use both Prototype and jQuery wrappers. These 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, the engine 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 we have to complete the Framework with some new features (see http://bug.archetypejs.org ) to reach the 1.0 version, but it's a very good way to prototypize any "Web 2.0" clientside project, and is already used in some big projects like Météo France (the official French meteorological Agency) and The Geoportal API (the official French geographical Agency).
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 planed to write the wrapper needed to use Dojo as the Archetype's engine in order to reach the perfect integration of both technologies.
We just don't try to reinvent the wheel! We take the "good ideas" we've seen in different environments (from serverside to clientside) and fill what is missing in JavaScript.
