Protofy – The art of Prototyping

Mootools has a great speed test for DOM selectors in JS libraries called the “SlickSpeed” test. The results compare “Mootools “, “Prototype ” and “Jquery“. In the instance that I ran ( I only clicked “Start Tests”!) , Jquery came in first.

Jquery is on the third column in the attached thumbnail.

Its also interesting to note that “prototype” finds no results for the CSS selector (“div:nth-child(even)” and “div:nth-child(odd)”).

[tags]jquery, mootools [/tags]

When you work as part of a large company, there is an overabundance of similar experienced people. While this might appear as competive to many, to some its an opportunity to form a community…

Jquery is as usual the best you can get with plugins as well as the sheer joy of writing short and sweet. In this post I talk about 5 re-used Jquery snippets across projects. Some of this may not be news to you, but for some it might just make you a “jfan”

It amazes me how people can “extend shortcuts”.  First there was Jquery, the shorter and meaner way to write Javascript and now there are extensions/ plugins. Smaller chunks of code that build upon Jquery to achieve cross browser effects. If you are still reflecting , I suggest you look for Reflections, the Jquery plugin that puts images in a new perspective.

The Jquery authors as well as other plugin writers virtually took out the need for other libraries, with a all in one package and a great support site. Having worked with Dojo, Mochikit, Prototype, Sarissa, Jquery feels much different.

[tags]jquery, development [/tags]

Well thanks for the single response, time for me to popularize this site I guess

 The code below is a left hand tree navigation built in ”Prototype“  without the tree elements . Its unique because…

• It highlights self, the parent it belongs to
• Collapses everybody if the great grandparent is clicked but expands only to the first child if itself is clicked.

Put it on a page and see it in action.

 This was the third JS library I tried after Sarissa and Mochikit, nowadays I am dojoing a lot

The file open / save dialog box probably gets the least limelight, it’s dismissed as fast as its invoked. However make no mistake the interface specialists probably gave a lot of thought. Microsoft doesnt seem to care to popularize the thought behind how its dialog boxes appear, but Apple does and I have a feeling that that MS simply read and copied from the Apple Interface

It seems the IE Team plans to do a quick job of making IE CSS 2.1 compliant, that means , it starts catching up with firefox standards wise but misses out looking into the future.

The caveat is only a doctype switch will enable compliance

In all, we made over 200 behavior changes (bug fixes or new features) under strict mode to improve CSS2.1 compliance. All this work (with the exception of transparent PNGs) has been done under the switch only, since all changes required behavioral updates to be more in line what the CSS spec specifies. To preserve application compatibility we will not make any behavioral changes to “quirks mode” as it has been established since IE6.What about css-3 features more particularly, device oriented, accesibility supporting programmatical language that the new genration promises to be.

While you and I can only debate, its heartening to note that they are looking at the comments of whoever can find them .

On another note, whats most interesting though is that a search for IE 7 ( linked as “find” above) has a certain IE7.com which has a big button for firefox and proudly claims “Neither this site nor Mozilla is connected with Microsoft. Get Firefox.”
Talk of the Netscape Days!

If you can guess right, I will share with you my personal worthy notes on CSS and the 5 greatest aricles that have been hidden from much of the dev population

The list includes but is not limited to

• Universal Selectors
• CSS 2.1 compatibility
• CSS formatting techniques

Its in vogue, calling yourself a Web 2.0 application, site or enterprise, but I really wonder if I touched the tip of the iceberg sometime back. 

 About two years ago I worked on a compliance management product that had reports. The team developing the application, suggested about 10 presets for 21 reports on the system.

 A preset was basically a combination of reports with filter criteria and actions at the end. For example you could have a report on audits completed before a deadline date by people who were users in the systems with more than 100 customers.

  The report could then be mailed to a Compliance Auditor or a trigger gets sent automatically informing users that they need to fill in their forms.

I differed and was suggesting them a collaborative approach where there were no reports on the system. Manager level users could create reports collaboratively and save them as presets. As a rule any manager user could create report combinations that anyone could access and define others as private.

The suggestion was turned down as most reporting systems done by the developers and managers involved either presets or only steps to generate a report and not giving user the control of combinations, let alone share them.

 Over a period of time, the presets ran out of steam. The product had a vast range of reports and different combinations for different users. Most users were creating reports for themselves, which were same and in some case communicating report settings to juniors, all that was required was “share report”.

We built a collaborative reporting system later but the thought was always there, a web 2.0 perhaps.