JavaScript

Gallery 3's core themes use the Superfish menu plugin for jQuery. Superfish provides very nice multi-level dropdown menus, but it does not include support for RTL languages.

I had started a post highlighting the recent Eclipse PDT 2.0 release but now find myself dropping the post and the Eclipse IDE altogether. Instead, I'll share why I've switched from Eclipse PDT to NetBeans.

It's common practice to skip the use of elements in simple forms. The most common example of this are site search forms. The following example uses a JavaScript event handler attribute to clear the input's value which also serves as the input's label.

I'd recently run across a nifty patch for Eclipse WTP which adds jQuery code assist to WTP's stock JavaScript features. The installation instructions looked simple enough, back up the original WTP JavaScript jar file, download the jQueryWTP patch, run it, and voila, jQuery development gets a little faster in Eclipse. Unfortunately, it wasn't that easy.

During my first attempts, the jQueryWTP patch installer wouldn't run on Mac OS X 10.4.11 at work. The patch wouldn't run on Leopard at home either. Neither the jQueryWTP project nor its SourceForge download page provide Java or WTP version requirements. All screenshots I've seen show installation on Windows. After a lot of flailing, I was eventually able to get the patch installed. Here is an archive of my trials and tribulations.

Although my JavaScript development focus is currently on the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) I do try to keep up with some of the other libraries. Here I'll begin to offer up my recent notes and observations on five popular projects, Dojo, Ext JS, jQuery, Moo Tools, Prototype/Scriptaculous, and YUI.