Friday, June 13th, 2008
MooTools 1.2 Released
Category: MooTools
Many people wrote in to tell us about the recent MooTools 1.2 release and updated MooTools website. Coming nearly a year to the day after their last production release (1.11), Moo differentiates itself from other popular frameworks by cramming Prototype-inspired helpers and smooth effects into a small download. Weighing in at 90KB uncompressed, this bovine package is quite a bit smaller than Prototype by itself (124KB) or when combined with Scriptaculous and all its features (~280KB); it’s also a bit smaller than jQuery (97KB).
(Of course, comparing sizes is fairly meaningless due not only to minification and gzip’ing distorting the numbers but also the large variety of what’s in the “core” distribution of frameworks and what’s relegated to other plug-in’s, etc.).
Some of Moo 1.2′s notable new features include:
- Better documentation
- Better fx, including new generic morph and tween effects that work on any style property and race-condition avoidance through effect “linking” (i.e., if you’ve kicked off an animated effect and you request another effect on the same element before the first finishes, Moo will queue the second effect to start after the first one finishes)
- True Hash object (instead of extending Object to provide hash usability enhancements)
- Swiff object for Flash content injection
- Per-element metadata storage
And more! I love the custom MooTools version builders for creating an optimized version of the MooTools core and MooTools plug-ins.
Milkshakes all around for the Moo team; congratulations on the new release.
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I love MooTools !
Mootools just keeps pluggin a long. It doesn’t get as much airtime as jQuery but it is an awesome framework.
After 1.2 the developers can focus on the fancier stuff. The rock-solid API provides the perfect base for it. It already works nice as Ext bridge.
Sigh. The daily struggle against misinformation continues.
Yes, jQuery uncompressed is a bit larger, but minified+gzipped it actually weighs in at 16.3kb to MooTools 19.5kb. Also, using the full Scriptaculous library in the file size estimate is misleading as well. Scriptaculous is modular, meaning you don’t have to include the whole thing. With Prototype+Effects minified+gzipped the file size is 27.1kb less than ~10kb difference between all of them. Throw in services like Google’s CDN and size is hardly an issue. As Ben stated, comparing sizes is fairly meaningless.
I am currently using moo 1.2 beta 2 with Ext 2.0 and loving it…
seems like there hasn’t been a meaningful update to scriptaculous in forever. effects are way buggy in IE too… I’ll have to checkout moo…
The race for smaller code is always great and all, but really now…Most people have high speed internet… If it was like in the baud days maybe then…
jdalton: Was an attempt to acknowledge Moo’s claim at being the “compact” of the full-featured frameworks whilst at the same time putting the value of such a claim in perspective (i.e., basically irrelevant given differing features of frameworks, dramatic compression of minification/gzip, etc.). Given the broad disclaimers following, mebbe calling that paragraph misinformation is a bit dramatic. ;-)
Who cares about 10kb to 30kb when google will host the files ;)
@Ben Galbraith, I am on your side (few last line of my prev comment).
I like the automatic animation queueing. That’s a great idea.
The last time I looked at it they had made it hard to use with code previously written for 1.11. Hopefully the harness you had to download separately has been integrated into the actual 1.2 release. If so I’ll definitely give it another look, but my 1.11 application currently is over 1000 lines long, and died horribly the last time I tried it.
@ifwdev :
Ho do you do this ? Did you wrote your own ext/mootools adapter ?
great work, congratulations for the release – this is by far the most succinct and intuitive framework that I have tried and it just got all that much better with v1.2
as for compatibility with 1.11… well, there are only a bunch of changes… Harald has kindly prepared a layer to help here:
http://digitarald.de/journal/38150523/mootools-1-1-to-1-2-compatibility-layer/
But i’d suggest – refactor what you can instead. I got about 5000+ lines of 1.11 code to go through but will do so gladly (when I get some free time).
@boodie, @Ben Galbraith and @Harald
Is not all only about the bandwidth, or server space, is about how much memory browser allocate to the script, a smaller footprint will make the browser faster or better said :less slower. This is all in user (site visitor) benefit.
When you start adding your own code, things get worser. So with all computing power and high bandwidth, I think is better to have as small code as possible.
…just my opinion
@ darkraver:
There is a great Ext adapter for 1.11 and this is the new one for Mootools 1.2: http://og5.net/christoph/?cat=articles
That Ext adapter looks cool. Is it solid? The author makes it sound pretty alpha.
perfect js-lib for easy & comfort coding!
Great. Now it seems powerful.
rborn: I dare that the size of the script-files has a lot of impact on the size it takes in the browser-memory (especially with sizes between 10kb and 50kb). Its more about the object it creates, the prototypes it extends or the elements it injects.
@csuwldcat
thanks, it looks great and worth a try
Javascript Frameworks that f*&% up the namespace and monkeypatch the core javascript objects need to die. Is it a coincidence that MooTools and Prototype are the only 2 frameworks that don’t work together? More like bad programming.
@jpcx01: There are performance benefits to extending native JavaScript base classes, though if you prefer to use a namespaced library, you can always use YUI, jQuery, Ext, Uize or many others.
The reason I’m commenting is actually to announce an article I wrote on The True Tribe giving a brief overview of the history of MooTools and talking about some of the big changes and improvements this time around:
http://www.thetruetribe.com/2008/06/whats-new-in-mootools-12.php
Thank you for this intresting piece.
cheers