JavaScript Coding with Class
I've spent the last two weeks in London, eating fish'n'chips, drinking cup'o'tea, and being a hooligan at the Arsenal. Oh yeah, there was a MooTools hackathon too. The MooTools hackathon was hugely successful and I'll be providing more detail about what was accomplished and where MooTools is going over the coming weeks. It was also great to meet some of the development team in person instead of simple IRC. MooTools FTW!
Another exciting part of my time in London was presenting at London Ajax. My presentation was called "JavaScript Coding with Class", preaching the values of class-based JavaScript frameworks like MooTools and Dojo. I kept the talk high-level but I'm confident I got my point across, showing the value of class structures.
This was my first time presenting this deck, so let me know if you see room for improvement (outside of the billion "um's" I used.)
Due to popular request, my slides have been embedded above.
![Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools]()
MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does. Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up. I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own. In any event...
![LightFace: Facebook Lightbox for MooTools]()
One of the web components I've always loved has been Facebook's modal dialog. This "lightbox" isn't like others: no dark overlay, no obnoxious animating to size, and it doesn't try to do "too much." With Facebook's dialog in mind, I've created LightFace: a Facebook lightbox...
![Morphing Elements Using MooTools and CSS]()
Morphing an element between CSS classes is another great trick the MooTools JavaScript library enables you to do. Morphing isn't the most practical use of MooTools, but it's still a trick at your disposal.
Step 1: The XHTML
The block of content that will change is...
![Implement the Google AJAX Search API]()
Let's be honest...WordPress' search functionality isn't great. Let's be more honest...no search functionality is better than Google's. Luckily for us, Google provides an awesome method by which we can use their search for our own site: the Google AJAX Search API.
There was one question I wanted to ask you on Tuesday: Do you think JavaScript is ever going to get proper built-in class support? What is is the likelihood of that? What is preventing this from happening?
I doubt it — it takes forever to get official changes to the ECMAScript standard, and Google seems intent on killing JavaScript.