Prototype 1.5 Released and Documentation Site Live
We’ve worked really hard getting the official Prototype site up and running and it’s finally here, not to mention we’re also releasing 1.5!
I won’t post a long blog here, because I’ve already done that on the official blog. Get the full scoop here.
The entire site was built on Mephisto. It was a challenge getting everything together, but those involved with the effort really went above and beyond. Especially Tobie Langel, Mislav Marohnić, and Christophe Porteneuve. A big thanks to those guys.
Enough rambling. I hope you enjoy the site, and I hope it brings a new level of clarity and community around Prototype. If you do happen to spot any bugs, feel free to leave a comment.
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Justin is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.
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Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.
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Best Practices For Cocoa and CocoaTouch—Invaluable tips from Cocoa developers.
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Sep25
Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter. I’ve put together a small script that parses vote data collected by Govtrack.us and posts to twitter.
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Protip: Color grep searches in terminal
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
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ActiveRecord Ported To Objective-C brought to us by Ninja Kitten
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With the release of Opera’s DragonFly, IE 8’s Developer tools, Safari’s/Webkit’s Web Inspector and Drosera; and the Grand Daddy of them all, Firebug – we’ve now come full circle.
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Feb08permalink
DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary
var selection; if(window.getSelection) selection = window.getSelection(); else if(document.selection) selection = document.selection.createRange(); document.observe("dblclick", function() { if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) { location.href = "dict://" + selection; } });A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.
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Feb08permalink
Object.extend(Date.prototype, { strftime: function(format) { var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth(); var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes(); function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); }; return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) { switch(part[1]) { case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break; case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break; case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break; case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break; case 'c': return this.toString(); break; case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break; case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break; case 'H': return pad(hours); break; case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break; case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break; case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break; case 'M': return pad(minutes); break; case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break; case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break; case 'w': return day; break; case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break; case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break; } }.bind(this)); } });UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen
Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.
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Feb04
A beautiful, organic animation by Flight404 created using Processing.
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Jan08
Aaron Patterson shows us how to define ruby methods which can be called from JavaScript using RKelly.
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Jan07
Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.
—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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Dec23
IE 8 PAsses the Acid 2 Test for those not keeping tabs on things.
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Oct24
Mislav has written up an excellent overview on upgrading Radiant (which used 1.5) to Prototype 1.6. The article does a great job of showing how 1.6 is superior to 1.5.
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Oct19
According to the New York Times, the Daily Show Archives, with over 7,000 videos are online—free and searchable.
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Oct11
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Oct10
—Erik Kastner shows us how it’s done.
Ninja Certified Copyright © 2005-2008 Justin Palmer | Powered by Mephisto

Discussion
I think I can speak for the jQuery team, and say congrats, guys. This has been a long time coming, and the site looks really good.
Keep it up :)
Nice work! I’ve pawed through the prototype source a few times and been very impressed with their usage of ECMAScript – very ‘unconventional’ to a lot of programmers. It’ll be great to be able to demonstrate it to a wider audience. I second Nate’s ‘Keep it up :)’
This is great! I started working on a pretty expansive project about a year ago and used prototype for a while. Eventually I gave it up for jquery, since the lack of documentation was frustrating. A year ago was back in the dark ages however, when I was using php4. While I like jquery, I’m getting a lot more familiar with rails and won’t feel timid about giving its integration with prototype a try now with the new documentation.
Beautiful job! I’d love to see more people using Prototype, and this site will go a long way toward making that happen. Thanks so much for all the hard work!
Just wanted to let ya know the link for Mephisto is spelled incorrectly. You left out the “H” it seems.
PS, good work!
Cheers
Pop: Fixed, Thanks for the heads up!
Great work, I believe one reason alot of people have avoided prototype is due to the lack of documentation. This has been a helped boost Moo.fx and jQuery’s user base. Now we no longer have that excuse. Excellent work Justin, this is a defiantly a project that has been needed for quite a while now.
Boy, this is really great. The momentum around Prototype and Rails seems to have dropped off so much in the last few months (where is Rails 1.2, anyway?), I’ve been worried that something like this would never appear. Prototype’s great, but it’s been massively eclipsed by the Yahoo UI library and the amazing support docs around it.
Speaking of docs, there was once a Rails documentation drive that generated something like $15,000. That project seems to have evaporated. What’s the deal?
Very nicely designed site! This will definitely fill a huge need, I hope the articles flow in. :)
Great – I’ve been looking forward to this moment for quite a long time. Thanks man. Your effort is much appreciated :)
Good work!
sliced bread, velcro shoes, pocketed shirt = prototype_1.5_documentation
Awesome! Thank you so much! So now you might find the time to finish your prototype book? ;-)
What a glorious day/website for Prototype! Lovely! The hole weekend is going to be coding and reading (API Docs) Prototype.
@Justin: Congratulations man. You’ve been hustling big time to get the effort better organized and it definitely shows. Great work and keep it up.
Rey Bango – jQuery Project Team
The new prototype site is very helpful. Having a nice, easy download of the entire javascript file is great for my workflow, too! :)
I did notice this link was broken: http://prototypejs.org/learn/working-with-events-in-prototype
Is the entire site a single mephisto instance? Any tips for us mere mortals? Specifically regarding what appear to be sub-sub-sections…
Thanks to everyone for the kind words. :-)
@Mike: Prototypejs.org uses the same Mephisto codebase as the Rails Weblog. The Multi-site feature in action.
However, the entire Prototypejs.org site is one instance. It took a little coaxing, and even some updates that we pushed into the Mephisto trunk to make it happen, but it worked out pretty well.
In regards to the child sections, thats fairly simple. Lets say you have ‘API’ as the main section, if you wanted all the classes, then you’d ask for all the child sections of api:
All the child sections of api need a custom permalink like api/form, api/element, etc.
We’ve also added simple conditionals and conditional plugins for liquid where you can avoid excessive assign_to calls.
of4578@encytemedia.com
Is there any way to determine how many recent comments it displays?
Justin, thanks for the information on your Mephisto installation. I was sadly unaware of its slick multi-site feature. Your post came just in time for a site I’m currently building.
Thanks for this new phototype site. I was so sad but since then I find it I’m in an exultant mood! Thanks :)
About time prototype got the documentation it deserved. Excellent framework btw, we’re using it on several client sites. Can I please request that you add search functionality to the API docs – that would be a great addition. Great job guys!
That was really hard work, but result is worthy of it, don’t you think so?! Thanks for that!
That’s really nice. Thanks guys! :)