Recently I have been doing quite a lot of development in JavaScript and I have taken a look at a couple of JavaScript frameworks mainly focusing onthe Dojo toolkit and Prototype. Both of these have their strengths and weaknesses, I must point out one of the biggest strengths of Dojo is, in my opinion, the Dojo.require() method which allows dynamic inclusion of those files/packages required for a given script.
Currently the biggest weakness of both of these is locating documentation, I started by just exploring the source and trying to figure out what functionality they provided.
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Earlier today I came across a few links which are definitely worth a read if you’re looking at Prototype:
- Overview of the Prototype Javascript Library
- A good quick over of all the functions available in the current public release, ideal as a reference sheet.
- Quick Guide to Prototype
- A quick introduction to the basic concepts of Prototype and some of the most useful functions.
- Developer Notes for prototype.js
- This could be described as the Un-official documentation for Prototype, it is very thorough and covers all classes and functions offered by Prototype.
- Script.aculo.us Prototype documentation
- Script.aculo.us effects library is built using Prototype, they have an overview of all the functionality along with working examples.
For a look at some of the basic features of Prototype in action you can check out my JSDebug utility, which has a version which takes advantage of some Prototype functionality.