Prototype: A Call For Documentation
We’re hard at working getting the Prototype documentation site ready for launch. However, we know there is already a lot of great documentation scattered throughout the web. Instead of us rewriting a lot of this documentation, we’d like to ask that the community lend us a helping hand.
If you’ve documented parts of Prototype, we’d be tickled pink if you’d be willing to share that with us. We’re looking for all types of documentation, everything from examples, tutorials, to general api docs.
How to send in your documentation
There are a few ways you can send in your documentation. Please include your name and Website (url included) when sending in documentation because we’ll eventually have a contributors list published on the site.
Send an email to encytemedia ( at ) gmail dot com with [PROTOTYPE DOCS] some where in the subject line, and the following applicable information:
- Attached file of your documentation (can be in txt, html, textile, markdown, etc).
- A link to documentation on the web that you’ve written.
- A link to a writeboard/writley/etc document.
Get on Board
We’re also wanting to bring a few people in to help out officially with the documentation site. If your interested in helping maintain the documentation, please let me know. It’d be mighty square of you to have an example of documentation or articles you’ve written regarding Prototype and please be sure you have time to commit to the effort. For example, if your a Carny or have your own Traveling Road Show, your probably not cut out for this gig.
So, without further ado, lets get this moving!
UPDATE: We’ve got enough volunteers for now. Thanks to everyone who volunteered to help out and to those who sent in documentation.
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
Justin is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.
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Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.
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Best Practices For Cocoa and CocoaTouch—Invaluable tips from Cocoa developers.
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Track House And Senate Votes On Twitter. I’ve put together a small script that parses vote data collected by Govtrack.us and posts to twitter.
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Protip: Color grep searches in terminal
alias grep='GREP_COLOR="1;37;41" LANG=C grep --color=auto'Stash this away in your Z Shell (~/.zshenv) or Bash environment (~/.bashrc) and set your preferred ANSI code.
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ActiveRecord Ported To Objective-C brought to us by Ninja Kitten
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DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary
var selection; if(window.getSelection) selection = window.getSelection(); else if(document.selection) selection = document.selection.createRange(); document.observe("dblclick", function() { if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) { location.href = "dict://" + selection; } });A quick (and probably dirty) Prototype-based hack allowing Mac users to get the definition of any word by double clicking it.
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Object.extend(Date.prototype, { strftime: function(format) { var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth(); var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes(); function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); }; return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) { switch(part[1]) { case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break; case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break; case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break; case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break; case 'c': return this.toString(); break; case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break; case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break; case 'H': return pad(hours); break; case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break; case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break; case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break; case 'M': return pad(minutes); break; case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break; case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break; case 'w': return day; break; case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break; case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break; } }.bind(this)); } });UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen
Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.
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Dustin might not surprise you at your house with a book in hand, but he’ll damn sure send you his innermost fu in the form of a shiny yellow and black book. It’s an excellent read if you’re looking to put more funk in your functions and class in your classes. Check out “Pro JavaScript Design Patterns” by Dustin and Ross Harmes.
—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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IE 8 PAsses the Acid 2 Test for those not keeping tabs on things.
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According to the New York Times, the Daily Show Archives, with over 7,000 videos are online—free and searchable.
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—Erik Kastner shows us how it’s done.
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Discussion
Most of my stuff is tutorial like. I don’t have them posted on my site, but one of my prototype tutorial is going to be in the rails cookbook. Drop me a line if you’re interested in tutorial like documentation or real life code examples.
Seems like a wiki would be a far better way to approach this problem.
@ Kroc Camen: You should try compressing it with shrinkSafe, Dojo’s Compressor.
@Arthur: The best compressor on the web is Dean Edwards Packer, it replaces relevant strings by shortcuts. Compression ratio can be up to 1/3.
See http://dean.edwards.name/packer/
Here is a quite comprehensive list of prototype rescources:
http://del.icio.us/subzero/prototype
It would be nice to see a lot of examples in the documentation. Unfortunately I am not a protoype pro so I can’t help much. The mootools.net documentation looks quite good. They are useing naturaldocs.org for documentation which seems to do a nice job.
I would like to help out, but I question your intentions as you have not disclosed how this material will be used and released.
What license will this content be released in? Will I be compensated in any way? How will I be credited for my work?
Currently this call for documentation is a black box. I don’t know what’s been submitted, what is needed, or how this content will be display. These factors are key for any real documentation project. Seriously, where’s the Wiki in all this?
I agree with Seg, I got the link here from [http://mir.aculo.us/articles/2006/11/02/prototype-documentation-call]. I was expecting to see the start of a website/wiki. Something I could see.
I do not mind contributing, but without understanding how it will be used/displayed/organized/distributed it is hard to commit time to it. Can you open up a demo of the app?
Personally I do not care about being compensated, as having a resource for prototype that I can sink my teeth into would be invaluable. Please do not be discouraged, this is a good idea!
I vote for a wiki too.
@Andreas K, packer doesn’t work, because Prototype uses whitespace shortcuts such as braceless Ifs and one line Ifs. JSMin will work on regular mode, but not on agressive (equivilent of packer). If prototype validated their code (with something like JSLint) and got rid of the hackish typing by adding a handfull of {}s and ;s then it would pack better and be more readable.