BernieCode

I was pleasantly surprised by all the good feedback I got for Animator.js since Ajaxian linked to the article.

The most requested feature was “Can I port it to MochiKit/jQuery/Dojo/mootools”. Which got me thinking – Animator.js is built on Prototype because I didn’t want to rewrite code for function delegation and element manipulation myself, but it doesn’t use any of Prototype’s advanced functionality. I could remove the dependency on prototype quite easily and then it would work with any toolkit. I estimate this would add about 1K to the file size.

Having a class that can be used in any toolkit would be much better than a number of independently maintained forks.

Two questions:

1. What changes should I make to ensure that it can plug in to your favourite toolkit?
2. If someone can make a product usable for more people by re-implementing basic functionality again, is it worth it? Or is the world standardising on Prototype to do all that for them?

I’ll be making another release in a couple of weeks so let me know your thoughts, and any other feature requests.

I’ve been meaning to set up a personal website for some time now. This blog is a place to help me organise my thoughts, and I hope in time it will grow into something that people find useful.

With that in mind here are my intentions:

• Content over opinion: nobody needs yet another developer weighing in on why Web2.0 is so awesome/despicable (delete as appropriate)
• Experimental over practical: I already spend 8 hours a day building reliable things with stable components and well understood techniques. Here I get to have more fun.
• Conversation over broadcast: I’m not even sure if I’ll have many readers, but any that I do have I invite to email me with any points, technical questions, suggestions, praise, damnation… Really, I love getting emails from people I don’t know and I’m not sure the novelty will ever wear off. I’ll reply to all emails and all blog comments.

Bernie :o)