Peter Michaux wrote: > On 7/19/06, Todd Ross <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> but I still believe in Prototype-the-project. > > I'm curious why.
I've already eluded to the why. Its the cleanest, most elegant JavaScript code base that I've ever laid eyes on. My first exposure to Prototype was when I was tasked with evaluating JavaScript libraries for work. I evaluated Prototype, Dojo, and a handful of other, smaller, ones. YUI wasn't available until a couple months after we had already chosen Prototype, not that it would have affected my decision. Dojo threw JavaScript errors left and right just browsing their website. That doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. At the time, Prototype also /seemed/ like it was under active development (although that can be hard to gauge as an outsider looking in). It was just transitioning to a rails/spinoffs project which I expected to *speed* development, not halt it. If I were asked to reflect on the decision to adopt Prototype today then I'd say that I probably backed the wrong horse, but my reasons for being attracted to Prototype in the first place are still valid. At this point it's also partly momentum. I've invested a fair amount of time in getting to know its capabilities and I've written a substantial amount of code that takes advantage of them. I've never touched the RoR wrappers however. I'm a Perl hacker by trade. > I would like to see Prototype.js out of Rails in favor of something > more like the Yahoo! UI approach. More modular. More standard style > JavaScript. And /significantly/ more verbose. I've taken a look at the YUI source since its been released and I'm still not as impressed as I was with Prototype. > Prototype.js tries to make JavaScript like Ruby. That is unnecessary > as JavaScript is a fully capable language of it's own. Then Rails > wraps Prototype.js code in Ruby. That is a lot of potentially buggy > wrapping and not at all DRY! JavaScript is repeated by Prototype.js > which is repeated by Ruby. Maintenance nightmare! Like I said; I've only adopted prototype.js, not RoR. script.aculo.us has a foot in the door where I work (another developer has adopted it) although I haven't done much with it. But, that would have pulled in Prototype anyway. > All this along with the fact that the prototype.js project is not > responsive is going to hold back the future success of Rails. > Client-side code will be a bigger and bigger part of web apps as we > head towards Web 3.0 (whatever that is) and beyond. And, that's the rub. It's why I've been such a vocal critic of the way that its being maintained. Prototype *is* falling behind. There is *no* stated direction for the project. It has one foot in the grave. The people who want to contribute to its success are being put off. > For example, I virtually rewrote the scriptaculous drag and drop > library to clean it up and fix about 15 tickets total. The whole thing > deadended because I couldn't take the punishment that Prototype.js was > giving to me daily. And did you submit patches for those tickets before giving up? Thomas has been pretty responsive in my experience. Todd Ross _______________________________________________ Rails-spinoffs mailing list Rails-spinoffs@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-spinoffs
