script.aculo.us is cool
As a technology realist I like to try stuff out before I say how cool it is (or not). I can say script.aculo.us is cool. Over the weekend I was looking for ways to make my Blog a little cleaner and more dynamic. Please check out my (Search etc) links in the top right corner you’ll see my little widget in action. Pretty cool eh?
To say this was completely simple is an over statement. You definitely need to cut some JavaScript and CSS code. But what intrigues me is that my learning curve was the toolkit and not making this cross browser capable (tested with IE 6, 7, Opera and Firefox). Also, I was able to complete this widget with about 10 lines of code. Very impressive! Lots of good examples out there too a good sign of a well adopted toolkit. One can quickly surmise there is an excellent foundation of AJAX and JavaScript here.
Now the techi stuff… In the process of creating this widget I came to a dilemma where I needed to serialize a series of Effects. Basically I needed to make sure my menu control was done hiding before showing the new menu. (try selecting Search then Subscribe)
Through a little research I deduced two resolutions.
Resolution A - Use an afterFinish callback
new Effect.SlideUp('inner-search', { afterFinish: function() {
Effect.SlideDown(elem); }
} );
new Effect.SlideUp('inner-search');
Effect.SlideDown(elem, {queue: 'end' });
There are many ways to skin a cat, right. Here is how I made my choice. Resolution A a) Complex code b) 2 effect limit Resolution B a) Simple code b) Ability to queue up N number of effects
Recommendation: Go with Resolution B. To wrap, I will create more data points for myself but, script.aculo.us is indeed cool!