JavaScript frameworks

For a long time I was dying to put my hands into web application development and finally the day came. First thing I realized is that the foundations I have are sufficient only to make me feel at home, but are not at all sufficient to do some really useful stuff.

To start with we have put couple of servlets and a basic html and made the skeleton ready. Now its time to pick one javascript framework available for giving the web those special looks. I did googling for about couple of hours and got to know below frameworks:

• jquery - Probably this is one of the recent (I know there is nothing like latest in our domain) frameworks out there. It provides various ways of manipulating DOM and event handling. Along with comes jquery ui, which provides some special effects like sliding, tabbed interfaces etc.
  

• prototype - This is probably out there for quite some time. This also provides ways for manipulating DOM and handling events. There are other frameworks like scriptaculous/rico, developed over Prototype for developing special effects and animations.

• mootools - This is all-in-one framework providing support for handling events, manipulating DOM, special effects, sorting of tables etc.
  

• yui & ext - Both very rich in features, but could not understand what they are and how they work as my understanding of javascript is very limited as of now :-(
  

• dojo - Yet another framework for DOM manipulation, dijit is developed over dojo for providing special effects.

Deciding on any of these frameworks would be a challenge, but fortunately other my job became simpler as there were other existing applications developed earlier using prototype/scriptaculous.

As I am skeptical about following practices (even standard ones, till I see the benefits), I did some research on jquery as an alternative to prototype. My understanding is that the way one collects a group of elements for special handling is different.

Jquery feels like a scripting language by the looks of its (non-object) syntax, uses CSS notations for forming collections and applying special effects whereas Prototype goes for object oriented notation. I also read some review which mentioned that Prototype also offers Jquery like syntax so it is all hazy at the moment for me. With this I am starting to learn Prototype/scriptaculous.