What's New in MooTools 1.2
I'm happy to announce that MooTools (Wikipedia link) has released version 1.2 of their excellent JavaScript library. MooTools, which stands for 'My Object Oriented Tools', was developed in 2006 by Valerio Proietti and his colleagues. It evolved out of Moo.fx, a lightweight effects library which plugged into the Prototype framework. It was similar, although smaller (and in my opinion, better) than the scriptaculous library. Moo.fx has now been fully integrated into the MooTools library and is not being developed further at this time.
Even before MooTools' 1.0 release on January 29, 2007, it had garnered quite a bit of buzz. There were even cheat sheets created for the beta MooTools library.
Thus, it is with great excitement that I announce a new version of this marvelous framework, with a great deal of improvements and additions to the codebase. I've been using 1.2 beta for quite a while and I think the official release is mostly a bug fix of the beta, so if you've been following this blog, chances are you've already been exposed to some of the new features in 1.2. Regardless, here's a full list of features and enhancements you'll find in the new release:
- Swiff, support for working with Flash SWF files, similar to the swfobject library
- Element storage allows you to store data in custom properties on HTML elements without leaking memory in IE
- Overhaul of Fx classes with many improvements, including creating a Tween class to create reusable animation tweens
- Overhauled Ajax requests; renamed Ajax class to Request , with JSON and HTML subclasses (for easily handling their respective data formats as Ajax responses)
- Element.Dimensions - makes it a breeze to get width, height, x/y coordinates of an element (either relative to document or to positioning context) and scroll height/width
- Created a Browser class to store browser, platform and feature information (e.g. whether the browser supports XPath or not). Before, browser info was stored on the window object. Also, this release renamed the properties from browser names to rendering engine names, e.g. trident4 instead of ie6.
In addition to the changes to the API and codebase, the following changes occured as well:
- MooTools now adheres to behavior driven development using specs
- The Hash Object - with get, put, each, some and a whole lot of other methods for manipulating data in a hash
- MooTools developed using Git instead of Subversion now - this will only affect you if you're used to grabbing code from svn (or if you're a contributor!)
- MooTools uses Lighthouse instead of Trac for bug tracking now
In light of all these improvements to an already excellent library, I think it's apparent that MooTools is really growing up and coming into its own. It's a force to be reckoned with and certainly a heavyweight contender against Prototype, jQuery, YUI and others.
I hope you've enjoyed this brief overview of some of the new features in MooTools 1.2. Now get out there and start coding!
Related links:
Docs and Demos
Compatibility
Git Repositories
Bug Tracking
MooTools User Groups
Labels: javascript, mootools
I'm happy to announce that MooTools (Wikipedia link) has released version 1.2 of their excellent JavaScript library. MooTools, which stands for 'My Object Oriented Tools', was developed in 2006 by Valerio Proietti and his colleagues. It evolved out of Moo.fx, a lightweight effects library which plugged into the Prototype framework. It was similar, although smaller (and in my opinion, better) than the scriptaculous library. Moo.fx has now been fully integrated into the MooTools library and is not being developed further at this time.
Even before MooTools' 1.0 release on January 29, 2007, it had garnered quite a bit of buzz. There were even cheat sheets created for the beta MooTools library.
Thus, it is with great excitement that I announce a new version of this marvelous framework, with a great deal of improvements and additions to the codebase. I've been using 1.2 beta for quite a while and I think the official release is mostly a bug fix of the beta, so if you've been following this blog, chances are you've already been exposed to some of the new features in 1.2. Regardless, here's a full list of features and enhancements you'll find in the new release:
- Swiff, support for working with Flash SWF files, similar to the swfobject library
- Element storage allows you to store data in custom properties on HTML elements without leaking memory in IE
- Overhaul of Fx classes with many improvements, including creating a Tween class to create reusable animation tweens
- Overhauled Ajax requests; renamed Ajax class to Request , with JSON and HTML subclasses (for easily handling their respective data formats as Ajax responses)
- Element.Dimensions - makes it a breeze to get width, height, x/y coordinates of an element (either relative to document or to positioning context) and scroll height/width
- Created a Browser class to store browser, platform and feature information (e.g. whether the browser supports XPath or not). Before, browser info was stored on the window object. Also, this release renamed the properties from browser names to rendering engine names, e.g. trident4 instead of ie6.
- MooTools now adheres to behavior driven development using specs
- The Hash Object - with get, put, each, some and a whole lot of other methods for manipulating data in a hash
- MooTools developed using Git instead of Subversion now - this will only affect you if you're used to grabbing code from svn (or if you're a contributor!)
- MooTools uses Lighthouse instead of Trac for bug tracking now
In addition to the changes to the API and codebase, the following changes occured as well:
In light of all these improvements to an already excellent library, I think it's apparent that MooTools is really growing up and coming into its own. It's a force to be reckoned with and certainly a heavyweight contender against Prototype, jQuery, YUI and others.
I hope you've enjoyed this brief overview of some of the new features in MooTools 1.2. Now get out there and start coding!
Related links:
Docs and Demos
Compatibility
Git Repositories
Bug Tracking
MooTools User Groups
Labels: javascript, mootools
posted by Jonah Dempcy at
12:50 AM
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