Last time I griped about ASP.NET ATLAS [LINK]. Ok so with that said, what’s the alternative? When I wrote my book (Amazon.com Mashups) I did most of the Javascript coding by hand. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t always easy. I tried ATLAS/ASP.NET AJAX and it sucks. I’ve moved on.

Decision criteria are as follows:
1) The stack should be fast, it should perform and add minimal overhead to my pages.
2) It should not impede interoperability. I want my code to play nice with others.
3) It should not slow me down. I do like Studio as an IDE and don’t think at this point I could switch to Eclipse.
4) The stack shouldn’t limit my control. With ASP.NET AJAX the biggest gripe I have is lack of fine grained control over the markup rendered.

Nowadays I’m favouring the following stack

a) Javascript library: JQuery and Prototype are my current favourites. They’re both fairly equal and I use them both interchangeably. I’m using Prototype for my next project although when I switched this site to WordPress I used JQuery. Both are small <30KB and easy to rampup on.

b) Visual effects: With minimalist design you don’t need a whole lot here. I use a mixture; I like Script.acul.ous as a core so far with add ons like jCarousel for special circumstances.

With this combo total JS over the wire is under 50KB compressed.

c) CSS layout: I write my own CSS but for layout I use YUI Grid. Very small, cross browser, does everything I need and nothing I don’t. 4KB thank you very much.

d) Server-side: (data-side) I’m still using ASP.NET nowadays but no ATLAS. I need to produce less markup and only that which I can control. No wacky $ concatenated Ids here please. I use the DataSerializers to produce JSON for data. JSON has proven more flexible than web services, just as interoperable as XML and less verbose. For transactional systems I’d still favour web services with the WS-* stack, everything in it’s place.

I can’t point at the site yet but there is one coming that uses this stack. Compared to Foolstr.com it has been a much more pleasant development experience and the site does run faster.

With so many options out there, what’s YOUR preferred stack?