Part 4. Advanced Topics

This final part of the book contains a couple of chapters that round out our discussion of Prototype and Scriptaculous. Having spent parts 2 and 3 looking close-up at the details of the libraries, we now pan out to take another look at the bigger picture.

Chapter 12 returns to the QuickGallery application that we presented in chapters 2 through 4, and gives it a significant makeover, using several features from the Scriptaculous libraries. Along the way, we also showcase a number of Prototype’s features and demonstrate how the two libraries can be put to work in a setting closer to a real-world project.

Chapter 13 brings the spotlight to bear on a facet of Prototype and Scriptaculous that we’ve been downplaying until now, namely Ruby on Rails. While the emphasis throughout this book has been on using these libraries alongside any server-side environment, be it Java, PHP, .NET, or whatever else, Rails, Prototype, and Scriptaculous have grown up together, and they have some very neat integration features. For those of you using Rails, this chapter will provide a handy reference on how to make Prototype and Scriptaculous even easier to use. And for those of you not using Rails, maybe it will provide inspiration on how to integrate the JavaScript libraries with your own server-side frameworks.