Comments on: What’s Up With MooTools

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:15:15 +0000

@SamGoody, we agree with a lot of what you have to say. There will be some news this week that I think you will appreciate. Stay tuned.

By: SamGoody

SamGoody — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:08:36 +0000

1)
Extensions and plugins are not available enough.
Why is it that people have to bookmark Clientcide to find all these plugins, and fantastic huge projects like MochaUI and JXLib might as well not exist, despite their use to so many Moolers? [Go ahead, how many people on this thread know we have TWO Ext style UI libraries?!]
It creates the feeling we are fighting the heads of Moo, who are scared the users will become too powerful or something.
And it creates the feeling that the library is small, dead, passe.
2)
People have to feel that the library is theirs in order for them to promote it (or even use it).
To do that they must have some way to feel their plugins are somewhat sanctioned, and they must be able comment on the works of others.
3)
There should be more outright promotion.

If there was a way to have all the plugins that people write in one place, that would do alot.
If there was someway those plugins could be rated by the community, that would do more.
a) It would show that the community is alive
b) It would give enough plugins for the dev to work only with Moo, without rewriting code. And it will give him the confidence to rely that he can find his needs here.
c) It will give the community a way to feel that they are a part of the project.

At the end of the day, all large projects only succeed because people feel it is “theirs”. Here, the devs make someone feel that their code is not wanted – go ahead release it on your own site if you want – and people feel that the project is not theirs.
Allow them to put it on the forums, it will be their project. Allow other users to rate and comment, it will become their framework as well.
This plugins will remain separate core, no need to worry.

Nothing new here, and I still love Moo, and use it all over. I know there is an effort to create a plugin section on the forums, and there is http://www.mooforum.net/scripts12/
But its gotta become real, and a link to plugins should be on the homepage.

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:17:20 +0000

@gonchuki, there are always reasons not to release something. We all look back at things we authored months ago with a tinge of shame. Releasing your code allows others to put it to use and to help you refine it. It’s worth the investment!

By: Brian Krygsman

Brian Krygsman — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 15:24:49 +0000

This post confirms again my choice of MooTools as “Javascript Library of Choice”.
Hearing that the developers are still focused on the original vision: “e a framework for developing JavaScript, not a collection of easy to install widgets that anyone can use.” impresses me greatly. Thank you for not caving in to feature bloat.

By: gonchuki

gonchuki — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:51:10 +0000

Well said Aaron. I tend to *try* to release my code, but I always end up in an infinite loop of refining/rewriting/refactoring and starting over once again.

It’s true that releasing code is very time consuming, specially to me as I don’t like to release undocumented or bad written code. To day, I just have one snippet of code in the public domain, and I’m definitely *not* proud of it, as it is just a helper to do the Wrong Thing.

Currently in my queue I have some helpers that work nice in conjunction with Harald’s SqueezeBox, in fact it’s something I did around 6 months ago but never had time to polish and release… plus, a somewhat “secret” project I started a couple months ago and never had time to refactor (current implementation was a quick hack and I even unnecessarily extended Array to use the function just one time.)

By: Rexxars

Rexxars — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 09:37:24 +0000

I agree with Thiago, Mootools needs to be evangelized more.
Also, I feel the mootools forge is going to help a whole lot – Having one place to look for MooTools classes is going to help out a whole lot. Fixing the docs to the search works like it used to would be a nice improvement too ;)

I’m opening up a blog where I plan on releasing a number of code snippets and plugins for MooTools soon – I hope to get some support, comments and hopefully some links from the community once it’s up :-)

By: Sean McArthur

Sean McArthur — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:30:07 +0000

I write a little Javascript, not usually a ton for Mootools, though I'd like to. Actually, I just did write a Mutator for Mootools last night, allowing Private variables. I know Nathan White has a Mutator to do so, but I noticed that because of his inner function, he unknowingly assigned all the private variables to the global this object. Hopefully I've done it right. If you see improvements, leave me a note. If this is useful, I'd like to write more code to better Mootools, on top of the little classes I write now and then.

By: Aaron N.

Aaron N. — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:45:06 +0000

@Tim, every little bit helps! I bet that if you look at all the work you do for your clients you could find more. I have a lot of clients that ask me for really esoteric things and there’s always a portion of the work that can be written abstractly enough to be helpful elsewhere. By breaking my Classes up into smaller bits of functionality I end up with more reusable parts…

By: Tim Lund

Tim Lund — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:32:54 +0000

I will Aaron, and definately inspired by your work here at clientcide.com + MooTools, but most of my JS work is very customer related, so I only have ~2 minor plugins that I think is needed for reuse.

I’m writing JSSpecs for one of them right now, but again, it’s only a minor utility plugin.

By: Timothy

Timothy — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:24:55 +0000

@Ryan, I agree with you completely. Developers want to know that something is happening, even if they do not know what. Enhancements to MooTools creates buzz, and buzz is good. It’s good for the community as well as a bit of advertising.

jQuery has gained such a crowd because its leader, John Resig, is great at voicing its strenghts. Now, I’m not trying to say that MooTools needs to compete, since every framework has its own strengths, but I’d really like to see the popularity of MooTools match its true potential. Too many people jump into jQuery without even considering other frameworks just because it has so much hype. So many blogs and tutorial websites push jQuery and don’t mention others. I’m not a jQuery hater, i’m just a fan of equal opportunity…