Monday, November 5th, 2007
New UI library for Prototype in the works
Category: Prototype
, Scriptaculous
Sébastien Gruhier, author of the VERY cool Prototype Window class has started a new initiative to build a complimentary UI library for Prototype. Accompanied by Samuel Lebeau, Juriy Zaytsev and Vincent Le Moign, the team aims to build easy to implement UI components that will enhance the user experience in web applications.
At the beginning of the project, it was only a full rewrite of Prototype Window but it became quickly a UI library based on Prototype 1.6 and script.aculo.us 1.8 to include all my previous components like Prototype Carousel ….
The current version is still in early stages but already provides some nice components:
- window
- skinnable
- shadowing system independent from window and skinnable
- div based
- resizable from all borders and corners
- custom buttons
- Dialogs (like it’s done in PWC) are not yet implemented but will be done soon
- carousel: only HTML content (no Ajax content)
- dock (experimental)
- shadow: a simple class to add shadow on any element with a absolute position.
Full details of the project can be found on Sébastien’s blog.
very very nice work
can’t wait!
i have always thought there was really a lack of interface objects from the proto community. one reason i was thinking of maybe switching to moo or yui, hopefully now i don’t
This is way cool. Go go go! :-)
This is awesome. I cannot wait for this. Hopefully it will be a supported effort as well that will grow as Prototype and Scripty continues to grow and evolve. I would love to help support this in any way.
FWIW, I think you mean “complementary”.
This is one to watch! Ajax Application development is getting really easy with so many libraries available.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.
Another clever piece of JS trickery due to be left unused because well, what can it *do*?
Contain HTML. Not very useful. At all.
I hope that these UI components will help people to create their own pages without stimulating them to create widget like environments, like the Windows demo suggests. Before you know it people are starting to build OS environments with docks and windows within their pages.
For those reasons I’m not so thrilled about the Windows and the Dock, a waste of time if you’d ask me. I hope to see more components like shadow and the carousel. With proper xhtml mark-up and the ability to customize, those components are more then welcome.
@Nick: Your notice is particularly important, we are working on trying to invite people to use such components on already existing markups (build a window from an element, create a dock from a UL, etc….) so hopefully it won’t lead to full widget environments.
Window demo is just a show case of what can be done with this class and its performance.
We hope you guys will enjoy, if you don’t, well, too bad…
feels like following the steps of jQuery. It’s nice to have two options to choose from.