Friday, April 10th, 2009
The New TextboxList
Over at devthought, Guillermo Ranch has rewritten his clone of Facebook’s “TextboxList” component:
It’s been some time since TextboxList got some attention. It is undoubtedly one of the my most popular JavaScript projects, along with the famous Fancy Menu (MorphList) and its slideshow sibling, BarackSlideshow.
TextboxList has been rewritten from scratch, and it’s more solid than ever. The first time around, elegance was not one of the goals. I focused on releasing the first open source script that reproduced the Facebook’s tokenizer.
Changes include:
* Compatible with MooTools 1.2.x
* New options, such as addOnEnter, which adds boxes upon pressing enter (useful for tags or categories widgets).
* More events, which gives the developer more power to extend it.
* Each element is now identified by an id, a plain value and a HTML value.
* Use of control, alt, meta keys no longer interfere with the elements keyboard navigation.
* Bugs with text selection fixed.
* Improved API, even more extensible.
* Plugins support
It also includes an autocomplete plug-in, which has its own feature list:
* Flexible. It does not depend on a specific data source (XHR, Json). Instead, the developer supplies the data which can come from anywhere.
* Binary search for maximum performance
* Simpler CSS with comments for non-experienced developers.
Guillermo tells us that a Dojo version is in the works, and Ajaxian reader Thomas Aylott adds “This thing is seriously awesome.” Check it out!
s/Ranch/Rauch ?
I did something quite similiar a while ago:
http://projects.functino.com/tagify/
But it’s not quite as powerful as “TextBoxList”. I like Guillermo implementation, really impressive.
Guillermo did an outstanding job with this plugin. It’s a classy, useful effect that should be implemented more often.
Ajaxian reader Thomas Aylott adds “This thing is seriously awesome.”
It’s true. That’s is what I added.
I should introduce myself like that. “Hello, I’m Ajaxian Reader Thomas Aylott.” lol
It certainly is awesome, and Guillermo has outdone himself. I’m a little disappointed about the commercial licence (which none of his other projects seem to have). It’s not that I’m adverse to throwing some dollars for his hard work, but the per-domain licence is stopping me from doing what I really want to do, which is to include it in my own open source, distributable applications.
Awesome, now to port it to prototype :/
it’s sad, but this guy has an unusable website, his comment system is styled so it doesnt work in ffx2, a demo of his work is unfindable (you only ever go from one blog post to the next), plus he removes any critical comments on his site. so, all told, not so very cool. just spare the hype and show a demo dude. cheers.
Tis a *very* nice bit of code, but I can’t see myself using for anything. If I want tags I’d rather just write a comma separated list – like adding contacts in gmail which has it’s suggest feature…
Looks wonderful! Can’t wait till the Dojo version comes out.