Scriptaculous & Working Weekends


bougainvillea
I’m experimenting with various little user interface effects from Scriptaculous (hence the working weekend in the title). Try them out!

Demo Effects Page

I spent about a month getting my drag & drop to work using some code from a German guy, and here I could have used Scriptaculous to do it. I’m not sure it woudl be faster iwth Scriptaculous, just probably cleaner-looking at the code level. I still would have to deal with persnickety absolute CSS positioning.

Still debating using it since as it stands, I’m downloading 2X as much JavaScript as necessary, due to redundant code. Thanks to Miranda for recommending Scriptaculous. What I’ve lost in years not doing web engineering I’ve gained by staying in contact with web engineers!

For geeks reading this- I’m using PHP to create client pages, that have Scriptaculous effects. I haven’t leveraged the XML page stuff, but that’s in the works currently, as my plan is to download 12 reviews from amazon, and 12 price comparisons, for my final “book club” page. The bes way to do that, I think, is to create an amazon services Request objects with XML and store client-side in a little data file that Ajax references. That’s the design, at least. Pretty processor heavy on the AMZN side, but supposedly they can handle 12 requests. I could cache it, or store it, but that’s an optimization technique I’ll just do later. The best way to do that is to have Ajax request the contents of the (currently) pop-up review page, or pop-up price page, and display in a new DIV. Wow, really using Ajax, like 2 years after I decided to read up on it.