Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease the development of dynamic web applications.Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around, Prototype is quickly becoming the codebase of choice for web application developers everywhere.

I was working on a web application at work when a colleague of mine introduced me to Prototype. Boy, is this great or what! Prototype version 1.5.0 is approximately 70KB in size. Quite reasonable considering the size of web pages nowadays.

I find the CSS selector functions, such as getElementsByClassName and getElementsBySelector, to be really useful. I used to think of CSS as an excellent way of separating a document’s content from its presentation. Now, I learned that CSS classes can also be used as tags for the various elements in a page. This makes some tasks a whole heap simpler, especially with the CSS selector functions.

Prototype also has a nice Ajax library. It abstracts the browser specific implementations and provides a simple interface to code against. I’m looking forward to trying this out. I’ve been borrowing AJAX books from the library for the past few months but never seem to have the time to read them.

To learn more about Prototype, please visit the official website at http://www.prototypejs.org/.

Quick Links

• Prototype Download
• Prototype API Documentation