Clientside for Mootools 1.2 - RC1 (a long time coming)
After many hours of toil we’re ready to release our first candidate of our public libraries. We’ve put a lot of work into keeping up with Mootools 1.2 and all its goodness, so hopefully the wait has been worth it.
First up, changes!
We’ve refactored nearly the entire library and in most cases the changes don’t affect the actual interface to the classes and methods, but not always. Like Mootools, you can download a compatibility layer which will preserve the old syntax if you have code that you haven’t updated yet.
The most interesting changes are as follows:
- Fx.SmoothShow/SmoothHide is now Fx.Reveal, Element.reveal(), and Element.dissolve()
- Fx.SmoothMove is now just Fx.Move and Element.move()
- stickyWinHtml() is now StickyWin.ui()
There are other changes, but these 3 are the big name changes. You can browse the Compatibility files and see the actual changes if you want to compare, but other than that all the new details are in the docs. Speaking of which…
New Docs
Check it out, yo: http://clientside.cnet.com/docs
These new docs are obviously rendered using the same docs as the new Mootools engine. The docs would be in much worse shape if it weren’t for one David Kelly who found the svn branch we’ve been working in a few weeks ago and started spellchecking everything for us. David found most of the odd formating errors and various syntax snafoos, but you might still find some. Let us know if you do.
Fancy New Download Page (Courtesy of Mootools.net)
It’s an obvious rip off of the Mootools download page, but we’re still really happy to have it. You can now click and download any portion of the cnet libraries and get it as a single file. You can include Mootools 1.2 with your download here or not, up to you.
Served fresh daily: http://clientside.cnet.com/js
No 3rd Party Scripts Love (yet)
We have two 3rd party scripts we include in our libraries: the awesome Slimbox and Digitarald’s Autocompleter. We haven’t ported either of these yet but we’ll get to them soon enough. Autocompleter has already been refactored for 1.2, so it’s just a matter of us extending it to support our specific classes (the “multi” variants and the jsonp version).
Coming soon
- Updated Mootorial (for both Mootools 1.2 and our code)
- Unit Tests
- Bug fixes, to be sure
So get started, and let us know how it goes!
P.S. A big thanks goes to Valerio and the rest of the Mootools team. Aside from Mootools itself, the download page and documentation engine are nice additions to our offering and we appreciate them letting us rip them off.
March 11th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Wow.. this is fantastic Aaron! I’ve been using your scripts lately, and I’m glad there’s now a download page and documentation. Browsing through the SVN directory worked, but this will be so much quicker.
Thanks again for all the work you put into maintaining your scripts for public use! I’m looking forward to your updated Mootorial. Your 1.1 Mootorial made understanding and learning the Mootools framework a breeze. I’d love to see it (the Mootorial + this site) more prominently displayed on the Mootools.net site.
-Erik Hansen
March 12th, 2008 at 4:55 am
Hi Aaron,
its a really great work, the new downloadpage is really clear and fine, i love it! Thank you for this great library. The only one thing what i miss, are small Demo’s after the Example Code’s on every Plugin/Util/and Co. at the http://clientside.cnet.com/docs/ site.
Greetings, darki
March 12th, 2008 at 7:28 am
[...] Aaron Newton of CNet has posted an update for his Clientside Mootools library: [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Thanks much! I’ve been talking up Mootools and the CNET libraries lately to various friends (who had been complaining about what a pain it is to work in Javascript). Plus, I’ll need to pull StickyWin into my new 1.2-based code sometime in the next few days. So these updates are really great, and well-timed…
March 12th, 2008 at 9:02 am
[...] Aaron Newton of CNet has posted an update for his Clientside Mootools library: [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
[...] Aaron Newton of CNet has posted an update for his Clientside Mootools library: [...]
March 12th, 2008 at 6:17 pm
[...] Clientside for Mootools 1.2 - RC1 [...]
March 14th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Hello Aaron, We all appreciate the effort you’re putting into this along with the effort of the mootools guys. Do you have an area where we can start submitting tickets for bugs and issues we catch? Thanks.
March 14th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
for now, use our contact form: http://clientside.cnet.com/shout-out/
March 14th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Hi aaron ,
im waiting for this release for a long time … any estimated time for full release so that i can really get into it
March 14th, 2008 at 11:22 pm
Well, we’ve got a lot of things going on, and this project is going as fast as we can manage it. I’m doing a lot of the work personally and I’ve got a lot of other things going on (I’m doing a startup and also writing a Mootools book and, in the rest of my time, consulting for CNET and maintaining this codebase). We’ve actually got portions of this codebase in QA now on various projects, but formal unit testing is something we haven’t started yet as all the unit tests aren’t yet written.
That’s a long way of saying “we don’t know - it’ll be done when it’s done.” You can download the code now and start working with it. If you encounter problems, let us know and we’ll address them as fast as we can.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:40 am
[...] http://clientside.cnet.com/cnet-js-standards/clientside-for-mootools-12-rc1-a-long-time-coming/ [...]
March 23rd, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Thanks for the great work Aaron!
Am looking forwards to the updated mootorial, it’s a great set of resources and I look forwards to your book too!
If I may make a suggestion for your updated tutorial, maybe some sort of linking/highlighting/guides for those that want to re-read your tutorial but just the bits you updated?
March 24th, 2008 at 9:40 am
As much as I’d like to do it, I know I just won’t have time for it. You’ll just have to skim through it when it’s up (after 1.2 is actually released).
May 5th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
[...] After a lot of start and stop work I’m happy to announce that CNET’s javascript libraries are now nearing final release for MooTools 1.2 compatibility. We announced our RC1 release of the libraries. We’ve spent the time since then writing lots and lots of tests to validate the codebase. At this point we’ve spent all our time writing the tests, but we haven’t actually put everything through QA yet. Still, we’re much more confident in the current state of the code and have started using the code in our live environments in a limited fashion. [...]
June 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Very cool stuff! Clientside is a great resource for tutorials on MooTools and additions like this plugin library.
I look forward to your upcoming MooTools 1.2 tutorials! I wrote a brief article on The True Tribe which covers some of the changes but I intend to write a series of in-depth articles examining the changes more fully. Here’s the article I wrote, if you’re interested: http://www.thetruetribe.com/2008/06/whats-new-in-mootools-12.php