Dojo vs Spry - real world

So for a while now I have been using the dojo javascript toolkit for my music sites. It has been working ok, but very slow. In addition the tab panels do not render until all other javascript, which isn't very good if you are using Amazon previews and google adsense in the same site.

I stumbled upon Ray Camdens post about using Spry's javascript framework instead. He posted some sample code on the new tab layout, so I decided to give it a try.

I found it VERY easy to integrate. Just a few changes to his code got it working well for my needs and using BlueDragon.

There are a few issues regarding the effects library, but I was able to get around enough of it for now. Mostly to do with people like me wanting the blind effect to be off to start and click to display. In addition when off to turn display off not just visibility. Easy enough unless you have variable length content areas. Just couldn't get 100% height to work out.

All in all I think my cfml processing speed is about the same, but the UI now loads into the browser much much faster. Since I am caching the actual html content (200,000 + files) the processing is pretty fast. Just need the browser to keep up now.

The problem with the cache approach is that if I make a change to the HTML I need to recache everything. That can take a while and is very server taxing. My 2GB of RAM just isn't enough. And it just isn't feasible to load that much information into memory cache instead. So I only have core heavy processing areas cached and suffer through recaching every once in a while.

Still, the approach has let me create 200,000+ web sites off of just 6 files of cfml and javascript. Pretty cool.