I’ve always been a Prototype advocate. Not for any deep down reason for how it compares with jQuery though, mostly because I was interested in learning Ruby on Rails and it happend to be the library of choice. With version 1.0 of jQuery hitting the shelves over the weekend, it’s a good time to reevluate the reasoning behind this. Luckily there’s great posts out there advocating both for prototype and Why jQuery’s Philosophy is Better. Interesting food for thought. Look forward to reading over jQuery 1.0′s source.

Busy couple of weeks. Nothing out of the ordinary going on, except that I’ve been working on ArcadeFly and learning a load of new things. At the moment the framework is extremely flexible. Everything displayed by the javascript is done through XML transformed using AjaxSLT (googles XSLT implementation). Makes updating everything insanely easy, because then it’s just a matter of fixing the stylesheet and possibly an XSL file. Sad part is the site doesn’t come anywhere close to working in IE. That’s not really a problem though, for now at least.

I’m starting to like the whole waking up at the same time each day thing. As long as people keep calling me at 9am on saturdays I think i’ll be able to stay on it too (don’t worry, i was already up . Friday at work was actually a a lot of fun. I’ve been messing around with Javascript xmlHTTPRequest for a while (here is a WORKING examples) and I got to actually write some aps with it. It uses a lot of the same ideas I’d planned to use with ArcadeFly. The main idea (well for the arcadefly case) is that when you’re selecting a game from a drop down you don’t want to load 4,000 games and have to select one, you want to select a category, or a sub category then get a much smaller list. Often when this is done it isn’t with xmlHTTPRequest of course, it’s done by loading all the possible combinations into the page, then nothing more needs to be loaded. This means there’s a lot of uneeded data sent over. One thing that really stands out is BackBase.com, which only has to reload exactly what’s being requested. I’ve been looking into cheaper solutions (700 Euro? ugh), but none seem as refined as that. Something new to mess around with at least.