Category: Prototype
Jun 302008
Practical Prototype & script.aculo.us: the book
Against all odds, I have written a book designed to familiarize the reader with Prototype and script.aculo.us.
How am I supposed to convey how hard this was? I’d say it was like giving childbirth, but the process itself took much longer than it takes to grow a baby.
Why did it take so long? First: unlike a […]
Jan 312008
Prototype 1.6 & Opera
Prototype 1.6.0.2 was released last week. It’s a bugfix and performance release, naturally, but for the first time Prototype boasts official support for Opera 9.25 and higher.
For a while we’ve supported Opera on a casual basis — we’d try to fix bugs reported against Opera, but we’d let small test failures slide. Call it C-grade browser […]
Dec 292007
Justin looks at what YUI gets right in fostering third-party scripts. In particular he enjoys the inline documentation, which gets converted to an API reference using JsDoc Toolkit. I’ve long been interested in inline docs, but have not found a system that would not require more effort than writing the docs separately as we do now. (Relatedly: Prototype UI seems to be using Natural Docs.)
Dec 72007
Rails 2.0 released. Includes the 1.6.0.1 release of Prototype (which will see an official release very soon).
Nov 72007
Pseudo-custom events in Prototype 1.6
I’m calling these pseudo-custom events because they serve the same purpose as standard browser events: they report on certain occurrences in the UI. Here we’re using custom events to act as uniform façades to inconsistently-implemented events. Together we’ll write some code to generate mouse:wheel events. At the end of this article, you’ll know enough to be able to write code to generate mouse:enter and mouse:leave events document-wide. 1
Aug 72007
The new version of iPhoto, announced not too long ago, features Web Gallery, a way to export your photo library to a .Mac web share. The sample gallery confirms that these Ajax-heavy galleries use Prototype and Scriptaculous under the hood. It could not make me happier that Apple seem to have adopted the two libraries company-wide.
Jun 32007
Belated note: in case you missed my Refresh Austin talk about Prototype/Scriptaculous, you can experience the slides without having to listen to my stammering commentary.
(6)May 12007
Prototype 1.5.1 released! If you’re still running 1.5.0, you shouldn’t be. The $$ optimization alone is worth the upgrade.
Apr 42007
Capabilities vs. Quirks: a look at browser sniffing
Two recent articles argue for an approach to writing JavaScript that relies on the individual capabilities and quirks of a browser, rather than one that relies on sniffing as a first option. This is a noble idea and one we’ve started to integrate into Prototype over the last six months. But, like everything else involving DOM scripting, it’s complicated.
Mar 272007
Here’s something I worked on for a few hours just to amuse myself. I’d develop it further, but I can’t see how this has any sort of practical use (also note the caveats at the top of the script). So here it is: a web page desaturator. Takes all colors in linked stylesheets and turns them into grayscale versions. Here’s a demo using a page from the Prototype site. Firefox only.
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