Saturday, February 14, 2009

New Technologies: Ubiquity and Cooliris

Ubiquity: a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.
http://labs.mozilla.com/projects/ubiquity/

Cooliris: a lightning fast, cinematic way of discovering the web.
http://www.cooliris.com/

Monday, February 9, 2009

jQuery vs Prototype

After using Prototype for the past 3 years, I've decided to check out jQuery a little more. I first heard about jQuery around a year and a half ago, but didn't spend too much time working with it since Prototype had everything I needed. After reading how everyone gushes over jQuery, I figured I should give it another shot, at least for comparison sake.

After first pass, it seems pretty powerful. The markup is a little foreign at first compared to Prototype. I'm not saying it's better or worse, just different. The selectors are much better in jQuery, which might be reason enough to convert. I haven't worked with Ajax in jQuery yet, but from what I've read the syntax appears pretty simple. Granted the syntax in Prototype is pretty simple too, so that's not such a big deal.

The biggest pain transition is going to be adjusting to the new $ method, which now returns an array of jQuery objects. Not exactly looking forward to the confusion.