.eternal

JavaScript version 2007

Merry, merry and happy, happy. And all that jazz.

This post is a statement of intent. Call it a new year’s resolution, if you will. I want to discuss what I will be discussing on my blog in the coming weeks, if not for the rest of the year.

As some of you (my precious few) readers have figured out by now, I use the Prototype (prototype.js) library (a lot) in my web development. I do, primarily, web application development for my company E-Technik. We are working mainly on GIS solutions, but also, in general, web applications and desktop management systems. Our partners and clients like web-based applications for ease of deployment, and like desktop applications for their look and feel. Naturally this leads to a Web 2.0 (does anybody – anybody – actually have a definition for that?) development style, using XHTML, CSS, XML, AJAX, JSON and all the other good acronyms you can throw around.

I use Prototype to implement these web applications because, well, really it was the first decent JavaScript/AJAX/DOM library I came across. I have since found other such as Mootools (which is poetic, since my nickname is Mr Moo), Dojo, YUI and Google Web Toolkit. These are all great, but I know how to use Prototype and have a fairly large vested interest in it now. It makes my heart glad when I see Prototype come out tops in various surveys of JavaScript libraries with the only real complaint being that it is bloated, which is not a concern of mine.

But, even if it were bloated, as it is, Prototype has its limitations. Hence Script.aculo.us. And hence my own modifications, add-ons and widgets. There is an enormous amount of code and other material available for Prototype, if you just know where to look for it.

And so to my intentions, my New Years Resolution version 0.1 beta:

• I want to tell you (and me) about all those extensions and add-ons.
• I want to release my own modifications and add-ons (I have a file called core.js which is included just after prototype.js which does a lot of my web application work for me and is required for all my widgets).
• I want to start at the bottom and work my way up through all my widgets. You know why they call it Windows? Because everything is a Window. A textbox is a window. A button is a window. A combobox is a window with a textbox window and a button window, with a much more complex list window which shows up when you click the button. I follow the same approach in my Prototype widgets.
• I want to start a community of Prototype widget builders, where all the widgets follow a style so when you know how to use one, it is an easy matter to learn to use the others. I want the widgets to have documentation. I want them to be slick. I want them to be the starting point for anyone considering a Web 2.0 application.

So, there you have it. A tall order? Maybe. But everything starts with an idea.

TODO: Linkify.

PS. I also want to remove all the TODO’s from my code.