Archive for December, 2009

MooTools 1.1 > 1.2 Upgrade Helper

December 31st, 2009 by Aaron N.

Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of addressing a large crowd of Joomla developers at their conference in New York. The Joomla community is a fantastic bunch and the time I spent there talking about MooTools was perhaps some of the best I’ve had. The people present were very interested in MooTools and as well they should be. Joomla ships with MooTools built in and there is a large community of Joomla plugin developers who end up using MooTools because of it. Unfortunately, it still ships with 1.1.

A few months ago we, the MooTools team, decided to start focusing more on helping the Joomla community with their upgrade woes and began to re-address the compatibility code for 1.1 to 1.2 in earnest. When I spoke in New York to the Joomla team there and said that our goal was to have something to help them upgrade available by the end of the year, there was, dare I say, rawkus applause.

Well, here it is, Dec 31, and I’ve kept my promise. With the help of many of the MooTools Dev team (Chris Pojer, Darren Waddell, Nathan White, and others) we’ve finally got a compatibility layer that actually works and, more importantly, helpes you upgrade.

First, it logs warnings to the console (such as Firebug) and helps you find the places in your code that need updating. The script is not a compatibility layer as much as it is an upgrade helper. Hopefully this will help us retire 1.1 for good.

Secondly, easily half of the work, if not more, was spent creating a test environment for it. When MooTools 1.1 came out, we didn’t have a test framework to run against the code. When we released MooTools 1.2, we did, and it shipped with tests for most of the functionality included. So to make this compatibility layer, we had to go write tests for all of 1.1 (about 400 individual tests), then write the upgrade helper, compatibility code, and then run the tests from 1.1 against the 1.2 code base with the upgrade helper loaded. Creating the tests for a deprecated code base is no fun but I’m glad we did, otherwise the compatibility code would be in far worse shape.

But as a result of all that work by the MooTools Dev team, I can say that the helper script we released today is likely to cover about 95% of all the changes between 1.1 and 1.2; the other 5% being essentially un-hackable. Still, for most developers, it should cover all their work.

Seeing 2010 roll in with people dropping 1.1 is a great way to start it. If you’re still running 1.1, now is the time to move on.

You can find out more about the upgrade helper on the MooTools Blog.

Posted in Code Releases, MooTools | Comments Off

The MooTools Plugin Forge

December 10th, 2009 by Aaron N.

For those of you who didn’t notice, MooTools released it’s long vaunted user generated plugin system today – The MooTools Forge [accompanying blog post].

First, this is just awesome news, and a big tip-o-the-hat to Guillermo Rauch, who wrote the app. For those of you who have been around our community for the last three years, the forge was always something we were “working on”. There have been many versions created over the last few years, and many other community created initiatives, that didn’t quite do what we wanted. Guillermo jumped in and built a great system, closely integrated with git, that, well, it kicks ass.

The Clientcide Libs

I’ve uploaded four plugins to the forge as part of the launch (Tabswapper, MenuSlider, HoverGroup, and dbug). I chose these because they were just the simplest plugins that I could release; they just don’t depend on much and they do one thing. Releasing Stickywin, for example, represents a much greater challenge.

One of the things the forge requires is individual git repositories for each plugin. This means that I have to split up my one big repo into lots of little ones, rewriting my download builder, docs engine, and other tools to make these things easy to manage. Consequently, moving things into the forge is likely to be a long and laborious task. For the moment, the four plugins I’ve released are just duplicate files of what’s in the single Clientcide repo, but eventually, once I’ve split them all up, I’ll remove all the files from the Clientcide repo and then include them all as submodules. For the time being, they will be duplicates, and releasing them will happen as I have time (which is not very much these days).

Good Times

I’m really excited about MooTools here at the end of 2009. I hope to make a longer post here looking back at all we’ve done this year, but certainly the Forge release will be a big highlight. 2010 has a lot of interesting things coming, I’m sure, but perhaps the thing I’m excited most to see is all the good things that the MooTools community creates and uploads to the Forge.

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