For the upcoming rewrite of Coffee & Feeds (aka The Great Refactoring) I’ve been farming out all the visible effects wizardry to the excellent Script.aculo.us, which is a JavaScript effects library based on the likewise wonderful Prototype.
Prototype itself adds a whole bunch of useful stuff to the JavaScript language turning it into a more agile beast at the cost of a few little niggles.
One of those niggles is it’s method of implementing inheritance which is teh_uglier. Enter Base which also implements inheritance but with much cleaner syntax. Justin Palmer’s blog, who is writing a book on Prototype ‘fesses up to using Base and Prototype together. Then the author of Prototype steps in and gives us the tantalising titbit that Base will eventually make it’s way into version 2 of Prototype.
This is great, but none of this solves the immediate problems of someone trying to write a robust, readable JavaScript application with inheritance right now. So you try to Google on Base and Prototype to get an idea of the problems you will face in combining them, however they are such generic terms that it proves difficult.
For the uninitiated, base is a common term used in OO related discussions, generally referring to an ancestor class higher up the inheritance chain and in terms of JavaScript, a prototype is a property of an object that is used to add custom properties to all objects of that type. So if you are looking for discussions about Base and Prototype, you are likely to come up with discussions about base and prototype. Kapish?
No matter how hard it is to remember the URL (where do the dots go?), at least script.aculo.us is not likely to get confused for something else. Even though I thought it said scriptalicious for ages.
Ugh.
Okay, yes, JSThing is also a stupid name, but I couldn’t think of anything better at the time, okay?
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