Monday, August 21, 2006

Unobtrusive Javascript Plugin

Posted by rick

Dan Webb and Luke Redpath have release the latest version of their Unobtrusive Javascript Plugin for Rails. It solves several of the main problems people run into when working with unobtrusive javascript:

  • Development isn’t as intuitive with Rails when you’re defining your custom javascript behaviors in an external file.
  • When working with pages with lots of images and content, the behaviors won’t be enabled until everything is downloaded and window.onload is called. It’s been solved with some nasty cross-browser javascript hacks, all handled transparently by Dan’s LowPro extension for prototype. This has been a big deal for me personally, so it’s nice to see it all solved.

UJS attempts to solve this by taking defined behaviors in the view and creating a tailored javascript file for it. Smart conditional GET and page caching techniques can be used to save bandwidth and time.

All in all, it looks like Dan and Luke did an excellent job on the plugin. Anyone using it? How’s it working out for everyone?