zahnster

Mootools (www.mootools.net) is a promising young javascript animation library. It prides itself on being very light-weight and customizable (you pick the components you want even before you download). It has great animation effects, moreso than Scriptaculous.

Yesterday I started working with the library, and after just a short time I had something awesome looking up and running. I was using the slider effect to collapse and show comments on a blog post.

However, this morning, I decided to add the prototype library because I needed to do some AJAX work.

More >>

Ever since getting on the rapid development framework bandwagon, the one part I’ve not been totally sold on is the use of helpers, specifically, helpers which replace HTML code.

The reasoning is that I’ve never really seen the point of them. To give an example, CakePHP has an HTML helper for creating links – and the code looks a little something like this:
<?php echo $html->link('link text description', '/path/to/link') ?>

Which isn’t really much more efficient than it’s HTML counterpart, written like this:
<a href="url">link text description</a>

In fact, the HTML is shorter to write out. So why even bother with HTML helpers?

More >>