Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
Adobe updates Spry Ajax/JS framework
Category: Adobe
Adobe released version 1.6 of their Spry Javascript/Ajax/Effects framework. The big focus for this release was compliance with web standards, making big changes to promote unobtrusiveness and progressive enhancement:
As I mentioned in my previous post, this release is about raising our game with respects to web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement, among other topics. We wrote a set of articles discussing these topics. You can check them out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/best_practices/.
In addition, the Spry team spruced up their selector traversal capability with the introduction of the Element Selector utility:
Ah, the sweet Element Selector. Along the lines of jQuery and DOMQuery, the Element Selector (SpryDOMUtils.js) is a utility used for grabbing multiple parts of the page using CSS Selectors and applying functions to them. Our speed is on par with other tools and we have robust and accurate CSS3 support. Read about it here and check it out here.
Finally, the team has created a Spry Updated for Dreamweaver CS3 which will provide extensive support for the Spry framework within Adobe’s editor product. This extension can be download via the Adobe Labs site.
You can download Spry v1.6 from here.
I wonder if ColdFusion 8 can be updated with this release of Spry?
I wonder when Adobe will use Spry themselves…
Their brand new devnet is based on Prototype+YUI:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/
Since I’m playing grammar police today… second sentence “enhanement” and third sentence “utlity”.
FYI: Tools->Options->Advanced->General->”Check my spelling as I type” comes in handy. :)
@Jc: They do unless you’re typing so fast and completely overlook the little red line below the misspelled word. ;) Thx again.
@ Philippe: Spry is only tactical for Adobe, while Flex is strategic, so it doesn’t surprise me that Adobe also uses other Ajax projects such as YUI and Prototype. With Flex they want to totally dominate the market for plug-in based solutions, while the Ajax-based Spry is merely an add-on for Dreamweaver and ColdFusion.
I wonder if ColdFusion is also tactical…
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
@Jep- for what it’s worth, plenty of Spry developers are using the framework independently of Adobe tools/products. Sure, we integrate tightly with our own authoring/server products, but the Spry framework has it’s own dev team, and out in the public for almost a year before DW/CF support for it was introduced. There’s far more lurking underneath the hood in Spry than either DW or CF leverages today.
-Scott, Adobe