It seems I’ve been reading mostly about jQuery lately in an attempt to make the jump, but Prototype seems to be in the headlines lately. Prototype has been in a bit of a dark age it seems. In the past year the only change I’ve heard about is the addition of the class selector, $$(). That’s not to say other changes haven’t been committed in the trek from 1.4 to 1.5, which was committed earlier this week, but there hasn’t been a great deal of knowledge from the source on the changes. That’s one of the biggest draws of the jQuery community — open communication coupled with a thriving community that spreads the word overnight. That’s not something that can change with the Prototype community with a single site, but it at least it should motivate the core audience. The site was started by Sam Stephenson (the father of prototype) and Justin Palmer of Encytemedia. It is the new official Prototype site, and should serve as a jumping off point until Palmers Pragmatic Programmers book is released.

Here at home with personal projects I haven’t yet reached the javascript stage of development on any projects I’m working on. So far it’s just been prototyping and interface design, so I’ve been able to site back and read up on Javascript libraries. Lucky I did because the end all reason to use jQuery in Coldfusion was released today as Rob Gonda announced the Ajax CFC for jQuery Alpha Release earlier today. I’ve liked everything I’ve seen of AjaxCFC, especially since there is quite a bit of support for Model Glue around the AjaxCFC community as well. Looks like this will knock out the last straw holding me to using Prototype. I’m looking forward to trying it out!

Is it easy to explain the difference between a hash

var myHash = {a: ‘value for a’}

and an object

var myObject = {a: ‘value for a’}

Sam Stephenson @ Ruby-sponoffs