“King of eye candy”

Kevin Yank has written an article about important JavaScript frameworks out there, and has some nice words on Prototype and script.aculo.us:

Because Prototype is so good at making low-level scripting less painful, a number of higher-level libraries have been built with Prototype as a basis.

script.aculo.us is the king of eye candy, offering easy-to-apply animated “cinematic effects” that can be used to enhance most web applications.

While it’s called JavaScript Libraries and Patterns: Yahoo! Does AJAX, the article really provides a short overview on Dojo, Prototype, AjaxTK and obviously the new Yahoo UIL stuff, plus has some advice on design patterns.

If you’re new to JavaScript frameworks, it’s a good introduction. For my part, I’d advise to choose Prototype, of course. 🙂

Flash without Flash

With the new portfolio page of Christof Wagner, wollzelle demonstrates the potentials of their JavaScript library script.aculo.us in combination with an elegant portfolio design.

Flash without Flash – the script.aculo.us effect(s) 😉

See www.christofwagner.com.

Update: the site got digged with more than 1,500 diggs. Interesting to see it creating so much controversy about accessibility, the role of JavaScript and Flash, and so on and so forth.

script.aculo.us V1.5.2 featuring auto-scrolling draggables

Here are the new features:

• Added auto-scroll option to Draggables and Sortables, activate with scroll: ‘id_of_scroll_container_element’. See test/functional/dragdrop3_test.html for usage/demo
• Add limit option to effect queues to limit the maximum number of effects in a queue, new unit tests for scoped effect queues, fixes #3498 [thx Abdur-Rahman Advany]
• Add Sortable.sequence method to extract the current sequence of a Sortable as an array, fixes #3675 [thx sphivo]
• Added activate method to Autocompleter that allows you to trigger the suggestions through other means than user input [DHH]
• Add assertEnumEqual for unit testing (from Prototype SVN trunk) [Sam Stephenson]

Additionally, various bugs where fixed (see the CHANGELOG for details).

Get it at the script.aculo.us downloads page.

(So I’m back from exploring London now, hope to get some more updates to script.aculo.us done over the next few weeks!)

Off to the Summit

Early tomorrow morning all wollzelle will be off to London for the Summit, a conference on the future of web apps.

Lots of interesting speakers there, including Joshua Schachter, Cal Henderson and Ruby on Rails mastermind David, plus various other Web 2.0 guys.

Hope to see some of mir.aculo.us’ readers there! We’ll be around for some days, so if anyone wants to have a meetup, just drop me a line.

Campfire: Web 2.0-style chatting

Head over to Signal vs. Noise to have a chance to test 37signals’ upcoming Campfire app.

1970s terminal glory on a Mac near you

So, with quad-core processors, multiple-gigabytes of memory and a terabyte of storage under your desk, it’s finally possible to perfectly emulate 1970s terminal goodness.

Activate “Classic Terminal” in the preferences, and maybe try out the baudrate simulation.

(Thanks to wombert for the link!)

Speaking at the Ajax Experience

I’m going to give a presentation on advanced user interfaces (using script.aculo.us) at The Ajax Experience which will be held in San Francisco from May 10-12th, 2006:

Ajax is giving developers and designers the power to access the back- end at any time. How and where does JavaScript and the Document Object Model fit in? How can they be used efficiently to provide next- generation form controls, sliding panels, loading-on-demand, activity indicators and
what-have-you?

Implement the next cool Ajax control using the Prototype and script.aculo.us JavaScript libraries and learn about the visual effects engine and how to best put it to use for your very own home- grown effects.

Of course, besides my talk, there are a lots of interesting presentations going on there, including world-leading JavaScript developers like Brendan Eich, Douglas Crockford and Sam Stephenson.

So, hope to see some of you in San Francisco! 🙂

New inline RJS for rails

Sam doesn’t stop the goodness coming, now with the new inline RJS updates (from the CHANGELOG):

Add render :update for inline RJS. [Sam Stephenson] Example:

class UserController < ApplicationController
  def refresh
    render :update do |page|
      page.replace_html('user_list',
        :partial => 'user', :collection => @users)
      page.visual_effect :highlight, 'user_list'
    end
  end
end

Now, that’s very cool for those “quickie” 2 to 3 lines .rjs templates.

See the changeset for more info.

Scoped effect queues explained

Abdur-Rahman Advany explains all about the visual effects queues of script.aculo.us and what sort of things you can achieve with them.

The short story is: You can create complete timelines of effects, with more than one scope (that’s what we call a “track” in script.aculo.us). This allows to do some neat trickery, like queuing effects up until other effects are finished, or limiting the number of effects that can occur in a scope (for example to prevent users from hitting a button 10 times because the effect looks so nice and breaking things by doing so).

So, if you’re using visual effects and want to have more control over them read the article.

(There are other articles coming up on Abdur-Rahman’s site on even more aspects of the script.aculo.us visual effects, please keep it up!)

Prototype gets selector magic

Sam Stephenson doesn’t stop to add new wonders to the Prototype JavaScript framework and the new $$ function that just got added to the Prototype SVN trunk is sure a fine example:

Example: Find all <img> elements inside <p> elements with class “summary”, all inside the <div> with id “page” and hide each matched <img> tag:

$$('div#page p.summary img').each(Element.hide);

Great stuff.