Lightbox2 jQuery and scriptaculous

Freeway
1

Just tussling PerchCMS and creating a lightbox2 gallery with it and noticed it’s now using jQuery which stops a having a Freeway slideshow at the top do the page or at least the option of it. You can’t go back to older lightbox versions for ever something will break.

Putting aside personal preferences. Why is Freeway following scriptaculous when the whole world and his dog appear to use jQuery?

David Owen

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2

Thats a good question!! although in reality there are a shed load of different libraries you can choose from, not just jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous. All have there strengths and weaknesses and there lies the problem… none of them are perfect for every scenario.

You could probably lump Prototype, JQuery, Yahoo UI, Dojo, Mootools into a sort of general purpose category and, Scriptaculous and moofx into another grouping which is more akin to an effects category.
I think the big thing that’s made jQuery so popular, is the corporate backing from Microsoft which has probably led to the huge amount of developers writing for it.

Why Freeway still uses Proto/Scripty as its primary library is probably partly down to historic reasons. Although I thought Exhibio used jQuery.

Personally I don’t mind chopping and changing the system I use, depending on which library will suite the job at hand. I am finding the downside to this approach is most third party developers like light-box writers or cms systems, don’t seem to think that having a choice of core libraries may be an important consideration with the result, that we seem to be heading down the jQuery route wether we want to or not.

All the best Max

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3

yeahh - even showcase is (and Background Supersizer as well).

I had some medium heavy discussions about this in the past (all friendly to be noted :-).

There is one downside on jQuery:

They don’t care about construction at all. A lots dealing with unordered lists, and as long we can’t wrap everything in

    such as images, it is mainly to be solved by MarkUp.

    Naturally not acceptable to an average mortal (“I never will learn any line of code cause I don’t want to…”) Freeway-user.

    Another point is, that we have way too less developers that are able to deal with this specific library and its rats in.

    My summary after years of tears:

    Bitten the bullet and threw out nearby all actions available. Started to deal with jQuery and am happy with the results (almost).

    “Protaculous” might be better - but there are so less examples to deal with and so less support - not worth to follow anymore - a pity btw.

    Cheers

    Thomas

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4

I wrote the original Protaculous Action when I started getting interested in Rails, which at the time was centered on Prototype and Scriptaculous for the in-page effects. A few years ago, Rails started shipping with jQuery as the default, and Prototype as the “if you want to” library, which was a blow to be sure.

I’m not sure why (besides the MS money) jQuery has taken off the way it has, since it seems to polarize JS developers into two camps: those who can write plug-ins, and those who know just enough to use them. It dumbs down most of the users, in my experience.

Prototype is a toolkit for building things – visual effects, if that’s what you want, or Web applications as I do – and it provides a nice layer of spackle over all the vagaries of browsers and JavaScript engines. I like to say that I could write jQuery in Prototype, but there’s no way you could write Prototype in jQuery. It doesn’t dig down deep enough or provide enough hooks. There is a secondary library for jQuery called Underscore, which brings a lot of the syntactical sure of Prototype to jQuery, but there’s still a lot missing.

The wave of the future isn’t jQuery, though, it’s native “vanilla” JavaScript. There were a bunch of articles on SitePoint a few months ago under the topic of JavaScript without jQuery. There’s a lot you can do without any library, especially as IE 8 is aging out of the audience, and IE 7 and 6 are nearly extinct. I’m not sure when I will put down my Prototype hammer, though, everything around me still looks like a nail.

Walter

On Dec 3, 2013, at 4:04 PM, max wrote:

Thats a good question!! although in reality there are a shed load of different libraries you can choose from, not just jQuery or Prototype/Scriptaculous. All have there strengths and weaknesses and there lies the problem… none of them are perfect for every scenario.

You could probably lump Prototype, JQuery, Yahoo UI, Dojo, Mootools into a sort of general purpose category and, Scriptaculous and moofx into another grouping which is more akin to an effects category.
I think the big thing that’s made jQuery so popular, is the corporate backing from Microsoft which has probably led to the huge amount of developers writing for it.

Why Freeway still uses Proto/Scripty as its primary library is probably partly down to historic reasons. Although I thought Exhibio used jQuery.

Personally I don’t mind chopping and changing the system I use, depending on which library will suite the job at hand. I am finding the downside to this approach is most third party developers like light-box writers or cms systems, don’t seem to think that having a choice of core libraries may be an important consideration with the result, that we seem to be heading down the jQuery route wether we want to or not.

All the best Max

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5

That may be true. My recruiter has contacted me about several jobs recently that are looking for people with pure js skills; no libraries, thanks. It’s interesting because not so long ago many of those same companies - at least around here - almost always wanted jQuery experts. It’s a wild ride.

Whatever the reason for jQuery’s popularity you can’t go wrong by learning the core language.

Todd

The wave of the future isn’t jQuery, though, it’s native “vanilla” JavaScript.

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