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Script.aculo.us makes better JavaScript-based UIs

Opinion
Dec 21, 20051 min
Enterprise Applications

* Thomas Fuchs' Script.aculo.us

Last time, I discussed a lightweight JavaScript effects library called moo.fx. Today, I have its big brother for you: script.aculo.us, written by Thomas Fuchs.

Like moo.fx, script.aculo.us is also built on top of Prototype. Because script.aculo.us is very powerful, the demos are very impressive and include a drag-and-drop Ajax-based shopping cart; autocompletion of text fields (see autocompletion text fields demo) with and without Ajax (see the Ajax autocompletion demo); and sortable elements using drag and drop with Ajax callback (see the sortable lists demo). It also includes sliders and combination effects.

The author has put a lot of effort into documentation and there’s a useful FAQ as well. So while script.aculo.us is a much bigger system than moo.fx, it is somewhat easier to understand.

These tools are amazing because you’ll see that much of the user-interface design vocabulary that we have with desktop application now has an analog in the Web applications world.

Finally, like moo.fx, script.aculo.us is free and released under the MIT license.

mark_gibbs

Mark Gibbs is an author, journalist, and man of mystery. His writing for Network World is widely considered to be vastly underpaid. For more than 30 years, Gibbs has consulted, lectured, and authored numerous articles and books about networking, information technology, and the social and political issues surrounding them. His complete bio can be found at http://gibbs.com/mgbio

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