MooTools

Moobile is a mobile web application framework built on MooTools. It focuses on building mobile apps that behave as close as possible to their native counterparts, either on a mobile browser or on a webview wrapper such as Phonegap.

Moobile is also meant to be extended. I believe one of the strengths of a mobile web app is the ease of creating something entirely different. Moobile helps in this area by providing a structure as well as controls, view and controllers that can be easily extended to suit your needs.

Moobile relies on external stylesheets for presentation and animations which makes it easy to customize. Rules that should not be changed are marked with an /* Important */ comment. Following these notes will make your app less likely to break or behave strangely.

Moobile also includes a simulator which works in Google Chrome and Safari. This tool will help you develop your app faster as it will give you a good idea of how your app looks and behaves on different devices and orientations. Also, it’s a lot easier to debug and profile your code on a desktop browser. The simulator, however, is not meant to replace a real mobile browser. I encourage to test your application often (and early) in a mobile browser.

Supported platforms

Moobile currently works on Webkit-based browser and has been tested with Safari Mobile on iPhone 3GS, 4, 4S, iPad 2 and “the new iPad”. The simulator runs in both Google Chrome and Safari.

Future Plans

Apart from the usual bug fixing and performance enhancements, the next step is to extend its supported platforms, starting with Android. I’m also looking to make Moobile work with all major browsers supporting CSS transformations, transitions and animations such as Firefox and Opera.

I also plan on improving the simulator so it can simulate multi-touch gestures much like the iOS simulator.

How to help

There’s so much to be done and so little time. If you’re interested in helping, you can contact me at jeanphilippe.dery@gmail.com and we’ll see what can be arranged.

Get it!

Grab your copy at www.moobilejs.com. The project is also hosted on github at www.github.com/jpdery .

Starting next week, we’re going to be holding regular IRC office hours for MooTools developers in the #mootools channel on irc.freenode.net. Members of the MooTools team will be on hand to answer your technical questions.

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MooTools has always prided itself with the quality of its developer community, and the MooTools development team has always highly valued the opinion and input of the thousands of users who continually support the framework. With this in mind, we’ve decided to provide everyone with a quick update on the recent work that the More team has been doing. Specifically, the meta things about More; the things we do to make working on MooTools More better and better.

MooTools More Team Has Grown and Been Busy

With the help of our two newest developers, Arian and Tim, the MooTools More team has been working hard to get More up and running with Core 1.3. Aside from updating old Core API calls, they’ve been fixing a lot of the Lighthouse bugs, as well as providing new improvements like Event.Pseudos, Locale and more.

The last of the 1.2.x More releases has been a priority since the Core 1.2.5 release. It will come with a lot of bug fixes and a few new features. The hold up is converting all of More’s tests to use the new process described below. As such, it looks like More 1.2.5.1 and More 1.3.0.1 will likely be released together.

Testing MooTools

To help with this increased development—and to make sure less bugs squeak by—we have set up a new testing environment using the wonderful Windmill testing framework. An example of the new sandbox environment can currently be found at http://review.mootools.net:9876.

A couple of us have also been hard at work improving the testing throughout all the MooTools projects, but you’ll just have to wait and see the awesome details in a later article.

Contributing is Getting Easier!

With the release of GitHub’s new Pull Requests system, we’ve found that they fit very well into the MooTools development workflow. The new system makes it easier for the developers to review pull requests, and makes the discussions associated with them public.

Because the MooTools community is made up of awesome developers who are more than happy to share their work and to give back to the project, we realized that this new pull request feature could be very helpful in accepting contributions from the community. As such, we are encouraging all of you to send us your pull requests for review and possible inclusion in the Core and More repositiories.

Big Things Happening…

We hope that you’re as excited as we are with what’s cooking on the MooTools development front. We’d like to hear your opinions, comments and suggestions in the comments section below, so don’t hesitate to drop a line or two.

We also invite everyone to visit our official Github repository and drop by the official #mootools IRC Channel on Freenode. MooTools also has a twitter account that you can follow for more news and updates.

And stay tuned—we have something very special coming in the next few weeks that will hopefully blow your minds.

Now off for a chocolate milk!

If you’ve been paying attention for the past few years, you’ve probably noticed the growth of MooTools, both as a project and as a thriving community. Unfortunately, it has come to light that many so called “members” of the JavaScript community may, in fact, be automata.

To protect ourselves and the MooTools community, we’ve started two physical screening programs (or “meetups”), one in London and the other in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In a surprising turn of events, both groups have had very informative meetings in which actual people have shown up, allowing us to conclusively state that at least some of the members of the MooTools community are, in fact, human. Insightful discussions were had by all, new users and advanced developers alike.

If you’re in the Bay Area or London, it is imperative that you attend at least one of our screening sessions, to verify yourself as human. To be notified about future meetups, as well as voice your opinion on when/where they should be, you can join the Meetup.com group for your area:

• MooTools London
• MooTools Bay Area

Anything Interesting to Share?

If you have something insightful and MooTools-related to share, and think you can spin it into a fifteen minute presentation, please let us know.

Right now, we don’t have any formal communication set up, but it shouldn’t be to hard to get in touch with either Darren (London) or myself (Bay Area). Contact information can be found on the developers page.

Thanks for using MooTools, and we hope to see you there!

Hey there MooToolers. I just returned from speaking at jQuery Conference 2010 in San Francisco on “Object Oriented jQuery with MooTools” and thought I’d share some notes on the experience.

My Talk

If you ask me how I did I’d say I missed a few connecting ideas but got the concept out there and got some people thinking. Several people came up to me afterward asking how to actually give this a shot on their web apps. Also, if you are reading this on a Mac, do this: command + option + control + 8 (⌃⌥⌘8). I think for the first time in the history of OSX this keyboard shortcut was useful. The projector had a hard time with my bright colored code on a black background so I inverted the the whole presentation!

Some of you have read my post Pigs take flight about using the Class module from MooTools to write modular code in a way we all love but use jQuery for DOM manipulation, effects, AJAX, etc. That was the basis of my talk. You can find the slides and a demo at my blog here.

The Demo is especially awesome.

Thoughts

It was very well attended, said to be the largest JavaScript conference ever. There were a lot of really talented people there and all of the speakers did great. I am humbled by the ability of the jQuery team to put together great events and market their library, I’d even say a bit jealous!

It seems at the user level people see frameworks as rivals or something, but at the framework developer level they generally feel like we’re on the same team, working to make the web better.

There was a lot of talk about organizing code, which is a problem that jQuery doesn’t try to solve. I don’t think any other framework can step in quite like MooTools to do it and yet keep the jQuery API in tact when writing an application’s code (thanks to mutators). Another testament that -core is rock solid and ridiculously versatile for JavaScript generally, not just the DOM. I also found that a lot of people didn’t know that you can create custom builds of MooTools to solve all sorts of JavaScript problems.

So, thanks jQuery for a great weekend!

• Slides and Demo
• Pigs Take Flight Blog Post
• jQuery Conference 2010 SFO