Prototype Developer Day

The first ever Prototype Developer Day will be held during The Ajax Experience conference in Boston, MA on September 29, 2008.

The best thing is: it’s completely free, and you get to hang out with some of the peeps from the Prototype core team.

Read more about this exciting opportunity, and see the preliminary agenda over at the Prototype blog!

And then sign up (again, for free) over at the special signup form.

Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us book hot off the presses

Prototype Core team member Andrew Dupont’s new book Practical Prototype and script.aculo.us is now available, and it’s a super no-nonsense guide to getting up to speed with the libraries, fast.

Andrew, being a UI developer by heart, doesn’t mess around and gives you hands-on examples for just about everything you can do with the “fraternal twins” Prototype and script.aculo.us.

You’ll learn how to really use all those fancy Prototype collection helpers (like each, detect, select, reject, partition, etc.), master the cool new custom events system, and seriously mess with the DOM; and how’ll see how Prototype can help you with everyday programming tasks with its extensions to functional programming and OOP. Plus of course how to make the most of Ajax and JSON. Last but not least, visual effects are explained, and also how they work by taking advantage of the DOM and how web browsers render websites.

The very interesting closing chapter shows you why things are as they are in Prototype, and will help you read the source code—and write JavaScript, Prototype-style.

New Prototype and script.aculo.us support mailing list

Subscribers to the Rails Spinoffs mailing list should switch to our new, better-named list: Prototype & script.aculo.us.

While these two venerable libraries are, in truth, spinoffs of the Rails project, we’ve come to realize it’s far more user-friendly to have the libraries’ names in the name of the mailing list. This should help guide users to the right spot and reduce the amount of support traffic on the Prototype Core mailing list — which is for discussion of Prototype’s development process, not support.

Because list spam is a sad reality, your first post to the list will be held for moderation. Once it’s approved, though, you’ll be able to post with impunity.

(Original article at Prototype blog)

Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet

Juriy Zaytsev just released a brand-new Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet that is a great time-saver for development and also makes a nice wall poster. As a nice bonus, it lists deprecated methods, too—time to get rid of those in your code.