Need JavaScript foo?

Check out Amy Hoy’s JavaScript Boot Camp tutorial, highly recommended!

Prototype & script.aculo.us Textmate bundle

Harald Martin Ström has created a bundle for easier Prototype and script.aculo.us development with everyone’s favourite editor, TextMate.

While not completely finished yet, it features a bunch of helpers to make writing Prototypish code even easier, with support for Ajax calls, enumerations or forms in Prototype, and Effects in script.aculo.us. It also features nice syntax highlighting of course, based on Justin Palmers earlier efforts.

It even features a cool “look-it-up-in-the-wiki” function: just mark a word and press Ctrl-Shift-H.

More about it & download here.

Extending Prototype

Here are two must-read articles on extending Prototype—here we go:

• Writing Custom Iterators For Prototype shows how to use the addMethods method of Prototype’s Element object and the comments include a nice $w() method akin to Ruby’s %w() shortcut for creating arrays
• The DOM Ready Extension for Prototype adds a nice Event.onDOMReady() method (also see this)

Nice to see this great stuff popping up everywhere—please don’t stop. 🙂

Plus, if you’re able to understand german, click here.

Safari gets JavaScript debugger

The WebKit nightly builds now sport Drosera, which allows for debugging JavaScript code in web sites and applications.

And it even has a cool name. Eat those bugs!

Happy first birthday, script.aculo.us!

Today marks the first birthday of script.aculo.us, which was launched on June 22, 2005.

Since it’s humble beginnings as an effects add-on to Prototype and coming directly out of what we at wollzelle needed for fluxiom, it’s seen many uses on high- and not-so-high-level web sites, plus it’s covered in many articles all over the web and the blogosphere and all kinds of books.

Conservative estimates are that script.aculo.us has had more than a million downloads (counting the packages from the script.aculo.us download site, and the inclusions within frameworks, first and foremost Ruby on Rails).

script.aculo.us was an enormous success (it ranks #4 in the del.icio.us all-time popular sites!) and personally I’m very proud of it (and all the people that contributed to it!).

A big thanks at all the contributors—let’s see if we can make the second year as exciting as the first.

The Web is still changing.

ASCII World Cup

Tune your telnet to telnet ascii-wm.net 2006

Or read about it here (also has mirrors).

Judgment (Rails) Day

Along with fellow core team members and other railsers, I’m going to be one of the Judges for Rails Day 2006.

With lots of cool prizes around, we’re probably going to have a tough time on deciding what’s best (and I do hope some serious freakin’ hot stuff will be developed!).

I’m going to hang out at the campfire tomorrow, and maybe I can even answer a question or two if you’re using script.aculo.us (or just hit #prototype on freenode.net).

Solving the onload woe

Dean Edwards, with help from Matthias Miller and John Resig has come up with a cross-browser solution for the onload problem (that is, onload only fires after all binary assets of a page are completely loaded, and not after the HTML document is complete).

The problem prevents using libraries like behaviour.js in a complete no-inline-javascript way in many situations, as users have to wait for all things being loaded before the page becomes usable.

Nice to see this issue finally being tackled.

(via The Hero Dies in This One)

Rails Day 2006 – June 17

Rails Day 2006 is coming soon and we here at wollzelle will add some cool stuff to the already very nice prize list.

I’ll give a quick update here, as soon as it’s official on the Rails Day site. Update: We’re giving away 5 fluxiom Pro accounts to Rails Day winners, read more on that at the offical Rails Day blog.

And for you Rails developers: I want to see some cool uses of script.aculo.us, so please don’t let me down! 🙂

Create happy users (slides from my Ajax Experience presentation)

First off, I’d like to say that San Francisco is a super-nice city (see our expressions on the photo!).

Without further ado, here are the slides:

Or: Create happy users (PDF, 7.5 MB, © wollzelle)

Btw, the actual title is “Combining advanced JavaScript/DOM techniques and Ajax to build better User Interfaces”, but yeah, well, you know.

Ajaxian has some notes on presentation so be sure to check these out, too.

Anyway, the Ajax Experience was a really nice conference, and tons of (nice, or should I say gentle?) people attended it (and my talk, too!). Hope to see some of you again soon.

The one thing I didn’t like about the trip was all the flying around. The airlines and airports really have to get their stuff together. 5 out of 5 flights had delays. We’ve also missed a flight on the way back and had to stay at a shabby airport hotel, and where delayed about 22 (!) hours, because of this. And we’re still waiting for our luggage to arrive. Time for some agility for travelling.

Update: Our stuff has arrived now, but things are missing (like one of the iPods). Well, anyway, hope to be back in San Francisco later this year (read it here first!). :/