Prototype and Scriptaculous in Action by Dave Crane, Bear Bibeault, Tom Locke, Thomas Fuchs

Prototype and Scriptaculous in Actionby Anonymous

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05/07/2007: JavaScript libraries have been in the spotlight the past two years and have been gaining popularity especially the past year with new ones popping up like JQuery, YUI!, Mochikit, etc. Though all of these libraries take after in some form or another the base library Prototype and effect library Scriptaculous. Thomas Fuchs is the main developer of the Scriptaculous library and Sam Stephenson is the developer of ProtoType. Although you can go to web site and go through the documentation at each site, having a book with other people?s explanations and examples are a great help for the newbie and advanced user. Each library has its own purpose so the authors take them one by one and explain what can be done with each and then show examples as they go. I like how all the example code are pointed out in the text as the author goes through them so you can understand the program flow as you are reading through the explanations. As a preface for people interested in buying this book, you should have a solid foundation on JavaScript or at least have a good understanding of OOP techniques in other languages. Since this book goes through many Ajax implementations as well, knowledge of a server-side language 'PHP, ASP.NET, Java' would also be helpful. I feel that if you are a beginner to JavaScript or programming that this book may well overwhelm you with technical information that you might not fully understand. But enough of that, let?s get on with the details of the book?. Chapter 1: A description, history and simple sample usage examples are given to the reader about Prototype and Scriptaculous. Basically Prototype provides a set of language extensions for JavaScript, for the browser environment and for the XMLHttpRequest 'object used for Ajax' object. Scriptaculous 'and other libraries' build on Prototype?s foundations to create widgets and other end-user stuff. The thing that sounds weird for people like me who don?t use JavaScript on a day-to-day basis is that JavaScript can be ?extended?. I use JavaScript at work on some projects creating some simple DOM scripts but I never knew you could extend the language. JavaScript provides a mechanism known as prototype-based inheritance which allows for this. Prototype doesn?t really ?do? anything apart from making it easier to create complex client applications. Though it does do a lot in that sense, but the author has to then use these extensions to create their applications. Scrptaculous makes creating cool effects such as drag and drop, animation and such in only a few lines of code. The author expands on this as well as some simple Ajax illustrations using Prototype?s Ajax.Request class in the first chapter. Chapter 2: A sample application is discussed called QuickGallery that displays a set of images in a photo gallery display using PHP to perform some server-side functions. The author created two versions of this web app 'classic ? page refreshing' and the web 2.0 'Ajax version' to show the readers what changes would be made and why. The application is simple enough but has enough detail to make this example a realistic scenario of converting a real web application to a more Ajax-based application. Chapter 3: Some basic techniques of Ajax development are discussed such as content-centric Ajax, script-centric Ajax, and data-centric Ajax. A review of Prototype?s Ajax classes: Ajax.Base, Ajax.Request as well as using XML and JSON for data storage and transfer. A very...