On Aug 22, 2012, at 5:57 AM, atelier wrote:
http://line25.com/articles/showcase-of-interactive-websites-powered-by-jquery
I get demands for things shown here. And that makes sense, when this becomes the new trend, it is likely customers are asking for it.
Definitely true. Prototype/Scriptaculous “peaked” a year or two ago, and jQuery (with its enormous corporate support, as well as the network effect of being the new hotness) has steadily become roughly synonymous with JavaScript.
Two scenarios: One has to analise an effect, take it apart into pieces, and rebuild it in FW with standard or additional Actions. When this works, everybody is happy.
Second scenario, the problems begins.
Say you have a site with some nice effects made in FW, thanks to one of the Actions. But one particulair function (read: wanted by the customer) seems easier to be build in by hand using a JQuery library. Now there is a chance that the pages contain too many JavaScript and unpredictable conflicts occur.
Do you recognise this?
If so, how do you deal with that problem? Leaving Actions alone, building everything in by hand, just to be on the safe side? Using FW only as a basic tool?
I am lucky enough to know how to do many of these effects by hand or with Prototype/Scriptaculous, and I can hand-code my way out of most corners. I am the exception here, I realize. If a well-written plug-in is used (maybe two) and jQuery.noConflict() is used, you can combine the two libraries quite simply, although you make the page larger as you do. Looking over this page Avoiding Conflicts with Other Libraries | jQuery Learning Center I can see several approaches that I could take in my Scripty libraries to accommodate jQuery, but I have resisted this so far because I don’t want to encourage this practice of making Mulligan stew out of a Web page.
Or is there another way to avoid these conflicts?
I am not naive enough to think that Freeway will continue to use Prototype exclusively; the winds of change are blowing quite hard, and I imagine it is only the size of the Softpress team and the number of hours in a year that keep them from a wholesale rewrite of all the built-in functions, and an e-mail to me alerting me to change my Actions.
Which will be a shame, really. Prototype is a well-worn tool in my hands, capable of much more than mere visual effects. I’ve often said that you could build jQuery with Prototype, but the opposite is definitely not true. jQuery takes you part of the way, then says, “You can just code the rest in JavaScript directly”, ignoring the very reason that Prototype exists at all – to smooth over the variations between JavaScript implementations on the various browsers where it must run. Having to hand-code anything more elaborate than a DOM search introduces technical debt and raises your test requirements exponentially.
If the time comes, I will go, grumbling as I do, to the dark side. But I will still carry that flame in my heart.
Walter
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