We explored various available libraries for managing dialogs within the application. We wanted an easy-to-implement solution that was intuitive to the user and didn't bog down the browser when rendering. We looked into the following solutions:
- Yahoo UI: YUI is feature-rich, but you pay for it. In order to render dialogs there were (IIRC) 5 javascript files to include. It also appeared to be slower than the other solutions and was a serious amount of code for just opening a URL as a dialog. Wasn't too hard to ditch this after looking at the more simple solutions.
- Lightbox gone wild: We liked this solution, but was pretty confined in terms of usage. You basically create links with a lightbox-specific class and then the initialization code for the page activates those links to function as lightboxes. No doubt this is easy, but it posed a problem with dynamic pages. We had some page that were returning links via AJAX, which would then require us to manually call the lightbox initialize() in order for those new links to behave properly. Wasn't worth the effort for the little (though nifty) functionality that lightbox provided.
- jt_appdialogs: This was a very simple solution, but seemed slow (moving around the dialog) and not very friendly to fetching URLs (designed for rendering divs already in the page).
- submodal: Another rather simple solution, but limited in functionality. Couldn't move the dialog around, though that's supposed to be doable. We also had issues in getting the right sizes.
- prototype window class: Of all the solutions, this was the easiest to implement, provides a very intuitive user experience, is well-documented and simple to use.
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