MooTools Blog: London Hackathon 2009

London Hackathon 2009

Written by Darren Waddell on 30 November 2009 – Posted under news

Anyone that follows any MooTools Core Developer or Contributor on Twitter may have seen us talking about a 'hackathon'. Last weekend a large number of the dev team met up in London to work on various parts of the framework. We thought we'd share with you what we got up to, some pictures, and give you a quick update on what to expect over the coming months.

Significant progress was made on MooTools 2.0. Additionally, we will be releasing a 1.3 version shortly, which will include some of the awesome stuff from MooTools 2.0, so you can get your hands on it a bit quicker.

MooTools ART also was given some love. One sticking point has been that Internet Explorer does not support the <canvas> tag but now thanks to Simo Kinnunen (sorccu) we have a VML adapter so we can push on with this development. We can now combine this with the work Aaron Newton has done with Cloudera and we should be able to launch a beta in the coming months. We're really excited by ART and hope you are too.

Another way we want to improve the MooTools experience is by adding demos to the documentation, particularly for some of the UI components in More. The Mootorial has always been a fantastic resource and thanks to Piotr Zalewa (zalun) and the awesome MooShell we are now beginning to prepare embedded examples in our documentation. We're writing some great snippets and demos and you can expect to see these appearing on our documentation pages over the coming weeks. We really love MooShell and the team have some great improvements to this valuable tool almost ready, including user accounts and versioning. Keep your ears peeled for a blog post with more details soon!

Next year we hope we can organize similar meet-ups that you, the users, can attend. We certainly intend to hold one in London in the spring, and are discussing other venues across the world. We're really excited by the prospect of being able to meet people face-to-face and hope that some talks and workshops are something that the community want.

We also want to give a big thank-you to Abacus e-Media for hosting the event. Here are some pictures of the dev team at work:

Look forward to an exciting announcement about the Forge which is currently in private beta -- your treasure trove of MooTools plugins will be here in time for Christmas.