I think the author has totally missed the point of jQuery which is why he's probably so frustrated. It's not meant to be used to build massive client-side applications, instead it's a tool to make dealing with the (terrible) DOM and AJAX APIs a bit more bearable and abstract away any cross-browser nuances.<p>Instead I'd recommend something like backbone.js or ember.js, they are both designed for building client-side apps.<p>He suggests using Prototype instead. Don't do this. In my last job we built a complex CMS on Prototype; it was horrible. Prototype's DOM API is verbose and unpredictable and the classical inheritance model it supplies isn't worth switching. Also development is pretty much dead, the last release was November 2010.
You could use ender.js (<a href="http://ender.no.de/" rel="nofollow">http://ender.no.de/</a>), it's completely modular.<p>It is not, however, ready for production use. At all. I had the following blocking internet explorer 7 for ten seconds each page load:<p><pre><code> if ($('input[name=firstname]').length) {
// stuff
}
</code></pre>
The bit it was choking on was the selector. Oh and there's the 2+ second processing time each page load on <i></i>any<i></i> browser when you've got more than about three modules loaded in.