Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Rico 2: Rebirth is near
Category: JavaScript
, Library, Prototype
Rico was one of the early libraries to show us nice effects on top of Ajax libraries. There has been a murmor that Rico 2.0 was in the works, and Tobie was right.
Rico 2.0 has a beta release available. What is new in Rico 2.0?
Components
Rico 2.0 extends the component set from the previous versions. The LiveGrid has been expanded to include filtering, column resizing, and many more features. The core of Rico 2.0 has been designed to enable custom components to be more easily built.
Animation Effects
Rico 2.0 provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on.
Rico 2 is built on top of the latest Prototype (1.5.1_rc2 as of this writing), which brings it up to speed.
It is good to have you back Rico. We look forward to seeing what you come up with next.
I used to love Rico, but there was such an extended hiatus that other libraries have come along and overtaken it. I think he just doesn’t have the resources (time) to devote to the library.
and at the time, he doesn’t seem to have the resources (server) to serve the library…
…very cool… I’ve gotten some mileage out of that accordion component… it’ll be nice to try out Rico 2.0! Thanks for the info, Dion!
I agree with ajaxianfading, the stuff is cool, but I just can’t see myself using it because of the lack in updates and support. I really think one of the major reasons for a successful project is how active the support it is. It makes everything different.
Still cool nontheless.
Glad to see this happening.
Darren, Sameera & I (along with Richard Cowin & Theresa Neil) started Rico back at Sabre. When three of us were hired at Yahoo! there just did not seem to be anytime to work on it anymore.
Kind of a shame since at Sabre we had about 30 components already written (like editable grid, etc.) that were planned to be refactored and put into Rico by the Fall of 2005.
After our exodus Richard kept it alive as he worked on the fiveruns.com project (Rails + Rico + Scriptaculous). Richard created a lot of really nice stuff for the library that I saw a year or so back but there was very limited help to get it out to the world.
I threw my support behind YUI, Darren was swamped with the new Yahoo! Mail, Sameera my.yahoo & the yahoo home page…
Richard informed me the other day that there are several folks now becoming active on the project.
Another rumor… there is a redesign of the site coming along with a tie in to patterns.
I really wish them full success, however, not sure if it is possible to compete against the plethora of toolkits that have matured considerably since then.