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.

That turned out to be a bad idea, as all of a sudden my mootools effects stopped working, and I was getting very odd JavaScript errors. As soon as I took the prototype.js call out, they went away.

After some digging around on the Internet, I found out that there are conflicts between the two libraries - and as far as I can tell, there’s no way around them. Of course there’s the moo.fx library, and that works to an extent, but there’s far fewer things you can do with that one (read: you can’t do the slider).

So, what started as a great morning left me with a sad heartache - and even though I was able to move over to scriptaculous and accomplish my task, I felt let down by JavaScript libraries in general - JS has always been my weakness as a programmer, and when the libraries came about they were refreshing.

…until one dumped me.