I’m using Freeway Pro 4 and am going to upgrade to 5.0 next week when it comes out.
Question: What’s Scriptaculous? I’ve been to the script.aculo.us site and seem to understand that it’s some sort of Java language or something. But would anyone be so kind as to write a few paragraphs on what it is, why it’s called script.aculo.us and if it’s going to be easy to incorporate some of the really, really cool things it does into my website (e.g. the Carousel that Walt has been showing people and some of the other cool things on the site)?
Scriptaculous is the name of a JavaScript effects library, which
leverages the Prototype JavaScript abstraction layer to generate all
sorts of clever visual and programmatic effects without requiring
Flash or another non-open method to do so.
In Freeway 5, a number of the visual effects have been wrapped
(expertly, by Joe Billings of Softpress) in Actions which permit you
to use them in your Freeway document without having to learn object-
oriented JavaScript or become a card-carrying geek. This is very
similar to what I have done with Carousel, in that each Action takes
a basic effect and puts some controls on it so you can simply apply
it to the page or to an element on the page.
I’m using Freeway Pro 4 and am going to upgrade to 5.0 next week
when it comes out.
Question: What’s Scriptaculous? I’ve been to the script.aculo.us
site and seem to understand that it’s some sort of Java language or
something. But would anyone be so kind as to write a few paragraphs
on what it is, why it’s called script.aculo.us and if it’s going to
be easy to incorporate some of the really, really cool things it
does into my website (e.g. the Carousel that Walt has been showing
people and some of the other cool things on the site)?
Excellent! Now all I have to do is decipher what “Prototype JavaScript abstraction layer” means.
I’m kidding.
Thanks, Walt. I’ll check out the links you sent me.
While I have your attention, I’m getting ready to launch an important website in early April. I’d like to incorporate some of the Scriptaculous effects into it, but don’t want to transfer everything over to Freeway Pro 5 if it’s got all sorts of bugs still in it.
Can you let me know if Freeway Pro 5 is as stable and bug-free as I’m hoping?
All modern browsers include support for JavaScript. Some even agree
on what that means – precisely – such that if you write a piece of
code and test it in one browser, it will run unmodified on a
different browser. Internet Explorer, for reasons best understood by
Microsoft, does not cleave to the open standards proposed by the W3C,
and thus will sometimes misbehave when it encounters valid code. It
is by all accounts the worst offender, yet there are practical
differences between all browsers which usually lead to endless work-
arounds in even moderately complex code; work-arounds which need to
be tested on all target browsers, and which add needless
complications to your project.
Prototype.js is a library of JavaScript code which sits between the
various browsers and your code and paves over these differences in
much the same way that Mac OS X sits over the hardware (PPC or Intel)
and provides a single, standard API that developers can code to,
without need for special considerations for hardware platform. (I’m
sure that’s not literally true, but it will serve for this example.)
In addition, Prototype is inspired by Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and
provides much of the “syntactical sugar” that Ruby the language and
Rails the framework provide. By “sugar”, I mean that things which
“should” be done a certain way for practical reasons are made easier
– sugar-coated – such that you will want to do them the right
way. Who on earth would choose to iterate over a collection of
elements, extending each one to include special methods needed later
in your code, when they could simply gather that collection using
Prototype in the first place, and get all the extra methods “for free”.
Walter
On Mar 22, 2008, at 1:26 PM, Jamie Turner wrote:
Excellent! Now all I have to do is decipher what “Prototype
JavaScript abstraction layer” means.
I’m kidding.
Thanks, Walt. I’ll check out the links you sent me.
The Actions contain these libraries, in compressed and minified form.
There is a special function in all of the Actions that use these
libraries which looks through the page and makes sure that only one
copy of the libraries is uploaded and linked to the page.
Walter
On Mar 22, 2008, at 3:19 PM, Todd wrote:
Does that mean that we need to download and install Scriptaculous and
Prototype separately from Freeway before we can use the new actions?