Part 1. Getting Started

This book is intended as an in-depth introduction to the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. When documenting libraries, it is important to present a feature-by-feature account of the details, but also to present the libraries in context, and show how they fit into the bigger picture. This part of the book deals with the bigger picture.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to both libraries and concludes with a quick example of how they can be made to work for us. Prototype and Scriptaculous are designed to make the development of Ajax web applications simpler and easier, and to remove a lot of the repetitive drudge work. We therefore present the same application twice, first with and then without the help of these powerful libraries.

We devote the rest of this part of the book to exploring a more detailed example application—an image browser called QuickGallery. We introduce the vanilla, non-Ajax version of the app in chapter 2, and discuss some of the limitations of traditional web applications. In chapters 3 and 4, we set about resolving these issues by introducing a variety of techniques for Ajax-enabling the QuickGallery app.