MooTools

MooTools 1.3 beta 1 launches today. Lots of bug fixes and improvements, and all that jazz. Before presenting you with a random rundown of features, let me be clear about something: MooTools 1.3 is (or will be) 100% compatible with every public documented API of MooTools 1.2. So chill already.

Anyways, here’s what’s new:

Globals

MooTools 1.3 moves away from the $name functions. Most of the useless ones, such as $chk (god knows why I thought it was a good idea to have $chk), were completely nixed. Some of them moved to the proper object’s namespace ($merge » Object.merge, $pick » Array.prototype.pick). Some others were renamed without the stupid $ in front ($type » typeOf, $defined » nil). In the end, there are a lot less global variables now. You can refer to the 1.3 documentation to have a proper list of what’s changed. Keep in mind that the old version of the methods will still work, by default. There will be a way in the future to “compile” MooTools without the compatibility stuff, but the feature is not ready yet.

From types with love

Every native type has now a from method that will try to convert every object passed to that type. Array.from, for instance, replaces both $A and $splat. Function.from will return a function that returns the passed in value, if it wasn’t a function itself. String.from… well you know that at this point, don’t you? We also changed how we internally handle Native types, but that should be none of your concerns, since they were handled with private apis anyways.

Generating your own MooTools, from your own computer

It is now possible, easy, and even perhaps recommended to generate MooTools (and its plugins) yourself. Last few months I’ve been working, on and off, on a pretty advanced projects-builder. It’s called Packager, it supports multiple project dependancies and has a very similar syntax of what’s used in the Forge right now. It’s written in php and you can use it from your php webpages to dynamically include JavaScripts for development, or you can build a single .js for production from the command line.

If you care to build MooTools and MooTools projects for yourself, you should take these steps:

1. Clone MooTools 1.3b1.1 from github.
2. Clone whatever other Packager-ready MooTools project from github (color, table and touch, for instance, are my Packager-ready plugins).
3. Clone Packager itself from github.
4. Read Packager’s README. Pretty much everything you need to know is in there.

Ofcourse, Packager itself is not limited to MooTools, MooTools plugins or just javascript projects. A tutorial post on how to use Packager for development is coming soon (few years tops).

If you dislike php, worry not! There is also a Django builder, called Depender, written by our Aaron Newton, on github as well. I really don’t know how it works, as I don’t do python, but I do know it’s scope is way greater than that of Packager. Depender can, for instance, dynamically build your MooTools for production use, like that. But don’t take my word for it, go check it out on github.

Slick

The most notable new feature in 1.3 is Slick. Slick is our new, shiny, super fast, exhaustively tested, pure-javascript selector engine. There will probably be a dedicated Slick post in the following days (or months, given our relaxed release cycles), but here’s a few Slick-facts for those who haven’t checked it out already:

• Slick is a MooTools-family project by MooTools developers Thomas Aylott, Fabio Costa and yours truly. It can be forked from github, free of charge!
• Slick is an incredibly advanced evolution of our previous selector engine.
• Slick is written using only pure-javascript, none of the MooTools apis are required. It can be used in any project or framework, and it does not require MooTools to function (though the MooTools DOM components do require Slick).
• Slick is speedy, blows away the 1.2 selector engine by 50%, at least. We will give you detailed data in the post dedicated to Slick.
• Slick supports every selector you can think of. Seriously, every one of them. I promise you.
• Slick is customizable, you can make your own pseudo-selectors, your own attribute-selectors, and many more your-own kinds of things.
• Slick supports reversed combinators. You might not know what they are, but they are pretty darn cool.
• Slick has a detached parser. You can parse a css-style-selector string and get back a property-filled object.
• Slick perfectly supports XML documents.
• Slick is slick!

On another note, thanks to the Slick’s parser, you will be able to build an element using a css selector. Let me give you an example of this cool new feature (courtesy of our amazing Christoph Pojer):

Creating an element using an object (the 1.2 way):

new Element("input", {"id": "someID", "class": "someClass1 someClass2", "disabled": true});

Creating an element using a selector string (the coolest way):

new Element("input#someID.someClass1.someClass2[disabled=true]");

In conclusion

As I get back to work on an exciting number of totally amazing upcoming MooTools projects that you know nothing about because you don’t follow me on github, I’ll leave you with a few useful 1.3 links:

• Download the built 1.3 beta 1 release.
• Fork / clone MooTools 1.3 from github, and build it yourself with Packager, or Depender.
• If you want a full changelog, go read the git history, you lazy bastard. Changelogs are so 2001.
• Wondering how those amazing new methods are called? You can browse our markdown documentation right on github.
• And don’t forget to report any issue you find with the beta, compatibility or not! The more reports we get, the fastest we’ll have a final release.

UPDATE: There was a “merge” problem with beta1, so we quickly fixed it and re-tagged beta 1.1.

Have fun with 1.3! I know I will.

Valerio

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 27th, 2010 at 6:25 pm and is filed under All.
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