Hopefully the first challenge got you excited for JavaScript development in a competitive environment…
One of the most common requirements of web applications is to be able to respond to user input, and in particular clicks (or touches). Continuing with our theme of element generation (and in some cases animation); this week’s challenge will be to create a basic whac-a-mole game.
The purpose of MooTools is not simply to bring syntactic sugar to JavaScript development but also to make you better at JavaScript. Often in forums and on Stack Overflow, the question will arise; “how do I do [insert UI widget] with [insert popular library]”.
The problem with these kinds of questions is that they often speak of the over-dependence on a certain framework (such as MooTools or jQuery) without a proper understanding of how JavaScript works or how to structure code well.
It is with this in mind that we want to set some challenges in plain old JavaScript (which are probably good programming challenges for any language) that will flex your grey matter.
Many of you have noticed that the Forge was having trouble updating and adding new plugins. GitHub updated their API to a new (v3) version quite a while ago, but we hadn’t been able to make the time to update the Forge to use it yet. On June 12, GitHub disabled the v2 API completely, and updating and adding to the Forge stopped working.
MooTools Core 1.4.5 is a maintenance release for the 1.4 branch.
1.4.5 brings a critical bugfix for Fx.CSS which caused many troubles for tweening and morphing your element styles. The bug was caused by a fix in 1.4.4 which should improve animating other length units like % or em (see #2160. Many of you noticed the bug and filled bugreports and also helped us testing this new release.
We have improved our tests and are planning to freeze the code for a new release for a longer period so we can gather more feedback to prevent potential regressions. If you’re interested in testing a new release in your application, you can ping us on IRC (#mootools on freenode.net), Twitter (@mootools / @astolwijk) or in the MooTools User Group.
Today we release MooTools Core 1.4.4 which is a critical maintenance release. 1.4.3 release introduced a bug as a result of fixing another bug. Specifically, 1.4.3 did not allow custom attributes (e.g. data- or non-standard attributes). See this issue for a full explanation and solution.
We recommend that all users upgrade to 1.4.4 as soon as possible.