Mootools

Hi all,

A friend recommended trying out the mootools library for implementing some pretty nice visual effects. By coincidence, looking through the forums, I noticed one of the moderators as recommended MODx, thought that was pretty cool.

Just wondering if anyone has any example of mootools and modx or just mootools.

Thanks
Lee

MODx has switched all its javascript work over to the MooTools framework in 096 (ie Quickedit, Marquee, etc.). If you place any javascript in your files that require it, MODx will automatically load that library. The best place to see examples of MooTools is on the MooTools site. Here is a link to the examples page:

http://dev.mootools.net/wiki/externalResources

Thats great news with the new release, looks like it will be a lot more lightweight.

Thanks
Lee

I am, so far, confortable only with Scriptaculous.
Can anyone more experienced tell me what are the pros using Mootools over Scriptaculous? Is it more lightweight?

Thanks,
Boby.

Yeah, MooTools is more lightweight than Scriptaculous. The scriptaculous source files alone are around 128 kb. Add the required Prototype library on (around 70 kb) and you’re up to almost 200 kb. Not that that’s bad...but the devs at MooTools have managed to build in alot of functionality into MooTools at a fraction of the size...and without the Prototype requirement! A compressed version of MooTools is only about 35 kb. Even uncompressed its still only about 72 kb. That’s pretty darn good for something that gives you most of the important functionality of Prototype and alot of cool effects! Plus, extending it and overriding it with different classes seems to be much easier to do than Scriptaculous.

there’s an excellent tutorial and additional libraries here:

http://clientside.cnet.com/devwiki/cnet-libraries

Mootools meets a couple of important goals that fit philosophically with MODx. First it’s lightweight and fast. Second it’s very extendable. While there are other systems that are a bit faster, not many that I’m aware of can match MODx for flexibility and overall performance. I think the same is very true for Mootools.

How about jQuery though..? isn’t it even more compact than MooTools?

With the added effects, not really. And it’s quite a bit slower in some key areas, even with the 1.1 release.

Ok.. I have no experience from either of those, so I have to take your word for it but from what I understood with a bit of googling is that MooTools is truly much better extensible than jQuery. jQuery’s biggest advantage though is that the syntax is very simple. You don’t have to write as complex code as you do with other libs. But the result from my googling session is that MooTools really looks the best fit for MODx. The basic idea in both MooTools and MODx is very similar.

EDIT: And I dream of the day that MODx has the same kind of download than MooTools has.. And what the little birds are saying, the wait might not be that long..