Chapter 12. Prototype and Scriptaculous in Practice
This chapter covers
- Using Prototype and Scriptaculous in a production setting
- Formulating a drag-and-drop strategy
- Using the Scriptaculous in-place editor
- Writing your own Effects classes
In the previous two parts of the book, we covered Scriptaculous and Prototype with a fine-toothed comb and learned a lot about the details of the libraries. We’re going to round off that knowledge in this chapter with an in-depth example of a moderately complex application.
Remember the QuickGallery application that we introduced in chapter 2, and Ajax-enabled in chapters 3 and 4? By the end of chapter 4, we had streamlined the navigation of the images on the filesystem by using Ajax, but it was still basically a file browser. Having the filesystem contents available over the Web is nice for remote access, but any desktop operating system would provide us with this sort of functionality anyway. Having seen what Prototype and Scriptaculous can do, we’re going to add some new functionality that the average desktop file explorer doesn’t have. This will give us a chance to see how Prototype and Scriptaculous perform in a real-world setting, and to encounter some of the design issues that you might come across in your own projects. Let’s begin by sketching out the requirements for our extended functionality.