[wp-hackers] AJAX / JS libraries

[Michael D Adams]

On Apr 23, 2006, at 6:32 AM, Ryan Scheuermann wrote:
> No offense to whomever wrote all this wonderful AJAX and list  
> management code, but I fear the maintainability and extensibility  
> of all this is going to become a problem in future releases.
None taken.  I'm not sure about your maintainability concern, though.

> Personally, I recommend Prototype.  http://prototype.conio.net/
Prototype is very nice.  It wasn't quite up to snuff when the first  
grain of ajax went into WP, and sack was lean, easy as heck to use  
and written by a "member of the WP community" (however one defines  
that).  Boom.  Instant category addition.

As the listMan stuff developed,  sack's limitations started cropping  
up.  That's why list-manipulation-js.php defines the WPAjax "class".   
It's a half-baked attempt to do some generic error passing and  
response validation, and it's a convenient place to keep any bits  
needed for consistency.

listMan is not brilliant code.  It's pretty ugly in places,  
actually.  But it gets the job done.  All of the JS files that use it  
are < 30 lines of code (most are ~5) and could be made even better  
with a tweak or two here and there.  Also (other than the recoloring  
of alternating rows) it all seems pretty fast (I don't have anything  
even close to a set of benchmarks).

If we decide to use prototype, I'd be all for that; it's popular,  
well maintained and it works.  Someone else can do the listMan  
rewrite (or replacement), though.  It should have another set of eyes  
look at it anyway.

Michael
--mdawaffe