MochiKit cons.. or not

I was taking a look at the AjaxLibraries section of the OSAFoundation wiki, because mochikit.com has been getting a lot of referrals from there. There's a bit of misinformation in the cons section, which I'll clarify in this post:

• Sparse visual effects library

This is fair, but so what? MochiKit is fully compatible with everything else. If you want visual effects, pick a library that does those and use it with MochiKit. It's not trying to do any visual effects right now, except rounded corners -- and that's because it was a contributed feature. JavaScript, particularly in the browser environment, is missing so many other things that making everything blink is not really a priority for us right now. Blinking is totally orthogonal to everything else going on. You know, like the stuff that actually matters.

• AJAX library (called 'Deferred') has limited functionality -- no POST, no access to result in XML, no ability to access HTTP status in error handling.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The AJAX library, called MochiKit.Async gives you full access to the XMLHttpRequest object throughout the entire process, which lets you do whatever you want. I imagine that the confusion arises because we make GET and JSON really really ridiculously easy. Because they are. There's nothing it can't do, though, because you have full control.

To do a POST (or any other verb), use getXMLHttpRequest() and set one up, use sendXMLHttpRequest(req, postData) to fire it out. If you want an easy way to build the post data, use queryString().

The returned Deferred object will call back with the XMLHttpRequest object upon successful completion (which means you can get XML, or whatever the hell else you want), or if there is an error, the XMLHttpRequestError object has a req object that corresponds to the failed request, and for convenience a number property that corresponds to req.status.