The Viamentis Blog

Scriptaculous is a Javascript library for providing Web 2.0 effects in web pages. Scriptaculous is built on top of the Prototype library(prototype.js).Effects provided by scriptaculous include Visual effects like Appear,Higlight, Shake etc of DOM elements. It also provides advanced functions like Slider, Drag & Drop and Autocomplete for text boxes.

A drop and drop shopping cart example can be see here

Scriptaculous can be downloaded from here…

Download and link the scriptaculouos.js file to your html page. Using scriptaculous effects is very easy

Example:

Effect.Appear('element_id'); (element_id is the id of a DOM element)

Similar examples with demo can be seen here

Scriptaculous library by itself is simple, but Ruby on Rails makes it even simpler. Rails has wrappers around scriptacuolus methods.

Examples:
i nclick => visual_effect(:highlight, 'msg', :duration => 1.0)

ii. <%= draggable_element 'idOne', :revert => true %>

Hey guys, hope you all know about FossConf. For the first time, Chennai has its’ very own FOSS conference, and we are very excited to be attending it. I am quite proud to be associated with it as a organizing committee member, though my contribution is quite negligible compared to others on the committee. As you can see, the line up of talks are cover the entire gamut of expertise, from beginner to guru-level.

It is quite refreshing to see a conference take pains to be beginner-friendly, and very student oriented. FossConf, just like ILUGC, is about real community, and real contributions. There is nothing quite like ILUGC when it comes to active grassroots FOSS advocacy. I have always been a great supporter of technical events with a strong community, and FossConf, organized by ILUGC, as per my expectation, will turn out to be a gem of an event.

If you are in Chennai, or can make it, do come down, and it is a great place to meet us, just drop us a mail with your contact, and one of us will catch up with you at the event. See you there!

Yesterday, I was at the PipesCamp organized by one of the little startups we share our office with, hover.in. They had actually requested me to give a talk, but things were so hectic over the weekend that I had practically no time to prepare, so I had to excuse myself.

But I was able to make to the event itself, if only as part of the audience. And it was loads of fun. The day started off with Bosky, the CTO of hover.in introducing Yahoo Pipes, it’s potential, and why it is a new paradigm worth watching. He then invited Prabhu, who then took the stage and showed us how you could do interesting stuff with Pipes and the iPhone. And then there was a panel on how Yahoo Pipes could be useful for the day-to-day work of a blogger, and they dragged me onstage, as they needed a developer’s perspective too.

For a question regarding what we thought Yahoo Pipes’ drawbacks, or why they aren’t as popular as they can be, I said I think that’s because it is very much a geek tool. Most of the bloggers are tech-savvy, but they couldn’t possibly expected to create something with Pipes, as it still feels like a light-weight IDE to me. I think something truly user-friendly, like a drag-and drop interface, regardless of the format of the sources, would help the adoption better.

And then there was a nice lunch, and people were encouraged to break off into teams and hack up their pipes, which was quite a bit of fun. I was about to start on my own, but  Moyeen seemed to be really keen on working on one too, but he didn’t have his lappie along with him, so I offered mine. Then I took a book and dozed off, only to be woken up for the demos. There were quite a few nice demos, which you can see on the PipesCamp page. There was also this very nice talk about Mashups and Monetization by Narain of Equvia. It is always a nice to catch up with him. All in all, a very nice, well-put together event.

 If you are in India and are interested in free and open source software, you must have heard about Foss.in. It is, arguably, India’s biggest open source conference. I have had a long association with them, and I have been attending it since 2003 edition. Now that Divya has joined me, and Unni will also be joining us in a few days, I thought it would be nice to take them both to Foss.in.

It was the first real conference I have attended after I joined my first job, and it made a great impression on me. I hope it provides the same inspiration to the new folks joining me at Viamentis. Open source software forms an important part of our day-to-day work, and we are grateful to be able to work with such great technology.

If you want to meet us or just hang around with us, you are most welcome. Just send me a mail (refer to the contact page) beforehand. By the way, we will be there for the main conference. Unfortunately we are going to have to skip the Project Days, though all of them look quite interesting.

Also, I won’t be speaking at the conference this year, though I had great fun speaking the last two years. The change of focus this time to having only speakers who actively contribute means that it percludes me. Though I do contribute now and then, I can’t really say I’m a major contributor to any open source project.

No excuses, I’ll try to remedy that next time around. Unni is very keen on contributing to some open source projects, so hopefully he’ll be able to speak next year. It would be a proud moment for us