Hi Sylvain and other AJAX gurus ;-)
I wonder, if you heard of Taconite [1] which seems to have released 1.0
recently?
It is licensed under the Apache License, but I don't know, if it does
what we need.
Additionally to the list of AJAX libraries already posted [2] I found an
other one in [3].
But unfortunately Taconite isn't mentioned in both lists.
Cheers,
Andreas
[1] http://taconite.sourceforge.net/
[2] http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Projects/AjaxLibraries
[3] http://ajaxpatterns.org/Ajax_Frameworks
Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Hi all,
A few days ago, I raised some concerns [1] about the Scriptaculous
JavaScript library which we started to use in the Ajax block, because of
modifications made to JavaScript base classes made by the underlying
Prototype library on which it is based.
I had no satisfying answer on the Scriptaculous mailing-list, and
removing the base classes extensions in Prototype would mean rewriting a
lot of things in Scriptaculous and is thus very unlikely to happen.
Furthermore, I also wanted to use the Sortable [2] class for CForms
repeaters, but had to make important modifications to the class itself
for this to work with CForms because the conventions used are different.
Considering this, I decided that Scriptaculous was a wrong choice and
looked to other alternatives.
The most promising so far is the Dojo Toolkit [3] :
- it has a very cool "load on demand" feature that allows to have only
bootstrap <script> tags in the page, and then load other scripts when
they are needed using "require('foo.bar.baz')". A must have in Cocoon
where each block may bring its own client-side scripts. Also in CForms
where you do not want e.g. to have htmlarea and calendar loaded in all
pages if not used in these pages.
- it is not only about cool effects: it provides a number of data
structures, can use iframes when xmlhttprequest is not present, tackles
the browser history problem in Ajax apps, etc.
- its development is community-driven, even if the original creator
plays the "benevolent dictator"
- it has an interesting test system that uses Rhino, and the ability to
assemble and compress a number of files in a single one to speedup
things in production.
The current drawback of Dojo is that the all the spiffy effects are
there (and more [4]), but lack a close integration with background page
update. But that should be a couple of classes.
All this to say that before making a choice for a client-side JS library
that more and more blocks are likely to use with the progression of Ajax
needs, we need to take a bit of time to find the pros and cons of the
various alternatives.
As 2.1.8 will be released soon, I will rollback changes to the CForms JS
library so that is uses the little home-grown stuff I wrote back in
July. I will also remove the Ajax examples that rely on Scriptaculous
(sorry Jeremy!), which will be reinstalled once we've taken the time to
make a choice.
Thoughts?
Sylvain
[1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=112921787207346&w=2
[2] http://script.aculo.us/demos/ajax/sortable_elements
[3] http://dojotoolkit.org/
[4]
http://dojotoolkit.org/~alex/dojo/trunk/tests/widget/test_FisheyeList.html
