First of all, no, Prototype isn’t completely gone, yet. I know I didn’t expect it either 😀

In general Prototype shouldn’t really be compared with JQuery, because JQuery is just an easy way to write JavaScript and  Prototype type is entirely different abstraction of the JavaScript language but for the sake of argument let’s say that they are comparable.

Several years ago Prototype was the popular framework for JavaScript and then JQuery appeared and Prototype was kinda forgotten.

Now popular applications that were using Prototype in the past are switching to JQuery.

And here comes my question: why? What happened with Prototype?

Well my theory is simple: Prototype is just too complex.

Prototype brings OOP into the JS world. The plain arrays, objects and primitive types that you previously had with Prototype are gathered into doing-stuff classes.

On theory, sure, it sounds cool – you have objects on the back-end you have objects on the JS front-end,  you can reuse functionality and structure logic and etc.

On practice though is more redundancy than good design concept (in my opinion), because you need to program (more or less) the same models twice.

If Prototype was more like ClojureScript and gave you possibility to transfer automatically the domain objects to JS front-end object I would actually understand the point of having Prototype but as it is right now in my opinion – having objects just to gather properties and functionality is not good enough reason to have them.

Btw  if you haven’t check out ClojureScript before please do, it is awesome (on a concept level at least :D)