Prototype Overhauled
I was just sitting down to write an article about the differences between the Event handlers of Prototype versus YUI, and many of the other Frameworks, when I stumbled upon the new release candidate (version 1.6) of Prototype. I have to say that I am surprised and impressed. A lot I planned to discuss has changed and it seemed more appropriate to highlight the important changes found in the next release.
http://www.prototypejs.org/2007/8/15/prototype-1-6-0-release-candidate
Here are the improvements that jump right out at me:
- Events have been overhauled so you no longer need to use the ‘bindAsEventListener’ Function to scope DOM Nodes or other Objects, instead scope can be passed in the observation declaration
- Custom Event - one of the most powerful Framework utilities is now available in Prototype
- More use of closures to create inheritance instead of Object hashes
- Semantic Sugar - most return objects are now wrapped with relevant Prototype Functions
- Commitment pledge support to JavaScript Web Standards
I believe with this new release the Prototype team is making a big step forward with their framework. My only concern is that they are still attaching methods to the Object and Array pseudo types. Otherwise, they have done an excellent job on refactoring the Framework. I will provide a link to the download when the official version rolls out.
