The Viamentis Blog » Javascript

If wishes were horses…

Vamsee — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 08:58:04 +0000

As it happens, I wondered if I could get to work with jQuery in a previous post. Looks like I turned lucky, and I was contacted recently to work on a javascript-heavy project. Initially we started working with jQuery, but due to the nature of the project, where in jQuery needs to live together with several other js frameworks, and Prototype being one of them, we quickly ran into conflicts.

There are several tricks to make sure jQuery doesn’t conflict with other frameworks, but none of them actually worked satisfactorily. We ended up using YUI instead because one of its’ strong points is a non-conflicting namespace. Another stroke of luck – I have been meaning to work with YUI too, but finally got the chance. A pretty tight deadline meant I had to get up to snuff with a lot of JS concepts that I understood only hazily, and it was great fun working with JS again.

JS is a very powerful language, and it’s very true that it’s a language that wears the syntax of Java, but it’s actually a kind of Lisp. It is very much like functional languages in its’ design, where functions are first class objects, of course with closures etc. Plus, YUI makes it even more fun – it has a complete set of controls which help you build very rich UIs. Also, if you’re interested in JS at all, I recommend reading YUI Blog – a veritable gold mine of JS-related info. A very enlightening blog.

Interesting: jRails

Vamsee — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:21:56 +0000

Now, this is interesting. I tried jQuery a while back, and have been looking for an excuse to use it in one of our projects. Since Rails is so closely married to Prototype, it’s not so easy having two different js frameworks to maintain. Until now. jRails looks interesting, promises to be a drop-in replacement for Prototype.js. Now things should get exciting.

Scriptaculous – a Javascript library

divya — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:34:01 +0000

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 %>