Are there alternatives to the Ext.js JavaScript GUI Library?

Before I choose the first / only JS GUI library I know, I'd like to see what else is there on the market.

Reason: For my taste, Ext.js has a too strong "Windows XP" touch which looks really weird on a mac. Mac users are my target customers, so maybe there's something out there that suits this much better or is more neutral.

Needed: A customizable GUI JavaScript framework especially for "intelligent" forms and form functionality (validation, pleasing visual feedback), Ajax roundtrips (i.e. checking if a user name already exists), sophisticated input fields like those from Ext.js, where you can also start typing in a dropdown to search through (similar to word开发者_开发问答 processors where you type in a font into the font selector dropdown), etc.

Most importantly customizable: My entire page is in black/silver/white style so it would be great if it was possible to develop own skins and graphics for it.

List of some Javascript GUI libraries (not ordered):

• jQueryUI
• jQuery Tools
• YUI
• MochaUI (based on Mootools)
• Dojo

ExtJS is designed to be easily customised. With some design skills, you should not have problems getting a Mac look and feel.

You may want to check out this service, which uses a very customized skin on ExtJS:

• Filespots - Find Out More

Filespots using ExtJS http://www.filespots.com/static/web/images/en/invite-users.jpg

Check out "qooxdoo", it looks a bit like Windows 7 but is themable

http://qooxdoo.org/demo

The closure library has some great UI Components. In the documentation, you can see the available components by looking under "ui" in the "Type Index" tab, or just look at the "Demos" tab.

There are a lot to choose from. ASP.Net AJAX is a good one (which has been extended - AJAXControlToolkit). Yahoo's YUI library is also good. This is just my personal preference, but I would stay away from JQueryUI.

If you’re targeting Mac users, Cappucino is well worth a look. It’s aiming to be the web equivalent to Apple’s desktop Cocoa framework.

You've got lots of choices in open source. Most leading open source AJAX toolkits have a UI component. As mentioned in a previous post, there are widget libraries based on MooTools, JQuery, and YUI. Dojo's Dijit library has a mature widget offering with a large set of widgets, including form and validation widgets, which can be themed with CSS (a handful of themes are provided) All widgets are accessible (keyboard as well as assistive technologies like screen readers) and localized in many languages. The core library provides wrappers for XHR and other server I/O as well as dojo.data, an abstraction to allow widgets to communicate with a variety of sources on the backend.

ExtJs ia a very mature JavaScript GUI library, so your choise is a good one. It is definitely much more object oriented than jQueryUI. It is customizable by themes. Have a look at this blog post. It doesn't (yet) have a theme roller like the jquery has, but a theme roller is in the roadmap for next releases. After experience with jqueryUI, I had to switch to ExtJS and I don't want to go back to jQueryUI. ExtJS is great, go for it!