The Blue Hamerite finish of JavaScript frameworks
I’ve been working on the same project for several months now so haven’t really had the opportunity to mess around with new web page layout ideas. After looking around at what’s going on in the more visual fields of web design and development I was amazed at how much things have changed in such a short period of time.
All of a sudden, the web is looking great. It’s almost as if the whole thing has had a makeover following the initial hype of Web 2.0. Or maybe this is Web 2.0, it’s just that it took a little longer to happen than we at first thought it would.
One area of development that is particularly interesting at the moment is JavaScript libraries. I’ve made some fairly dramatic structural changes to our site at work using JavaScript working in conjunction with the Document Object Model, but these are scripts that I’ve written myself for a particular purpose and as such are fairly bullet proof. A library takes it a step further by offering the kind of functionality that I’d never have the time to develop.
My initial impressions of the Mootools framework was excitement tinged with the usual IE disappointment, and because of its Object Orientated nature I found debugging to be a much more drawn out process. Although it has to be said, that in itself was a superb lesson in Object Orientation.
Although we’re yet to go live with any of the functionality I’ve been playing with, it is great fun, there are simply hours of pleasure to be had from playing around with the framework and snippets of code. The whole thing reminded me of unwrapping my first metal toolbox as a child (Blue Hamerite finish).
This is a great website too http://css-tricks.com/