Further to what vicaya said, when you are building a huge system like Cloudera, you should invest extra time/$$$ and write your own library. Crockford wasn't j

Further to what vicaya said, when you are building a huge system like Cloudera, you should invest extra time/$$$ and write your own library. Crockford wasn't joking when he called javascript the most misunderstood language. A lot of libraries have really bad code- Its a huge risk to take to build an entire system on top of the library, without properly understanding the kind of code you are dealing with. The number of Javascript experts that haven`t gone through the EcmaScript specs is probably upwards of 99% (I only guess, ofcourse, based on the "advanced" code that I have seen). Seeing as a lot of people prefer jQuery, and not wanting to get into a debate of its usefulness, the point is simply this: When writing a huge system, crank out your own library. 2k-4k lines wont take that long to write. Take a week out, decide what your specific app needs, and then write a library to handle those needs. If its a small site, or one that will run on a specific set of browsers in a contained environment, a library will do fine.