Author: chris

Only a day or two old and already my JavaScript library baby is learning new stuff. Namely it’s learnt how to pass the selected value of a select element to a remote page and load the response of that page into a named element. If you didn’t understand that, don’t worry. I’m barely there myself. So let me give an example.

Let’s say you have a list of musical styles and when someone chooses one you want to send their selection to a remote page. That remote page will look at their selection and bring back a load of sub-genres for that genre. So if they choose ‘Rock’ they will get back ‘Indie’, ‘metal’, ‘Glam’ etc. With me so far?

That remote page could build a new list of all the sub-genres, and Performer will take that sub-genre list and load it back into the original page inside the element you specify. And all that in the blink of an eye, or at least click of a mouse. Or, indeed, the press of a key – this function (and all the others, as far as my testing has proved) is keyboard-friendly.

Anyway, give it a whirl.

The time has come, after many months of development deep in my secret lab, to release my monster lovely library into the wild. Here’s the skinny:

It’s called Performer. It allows you, using nothing but standard HTML code, to add functionality to your web pages. Functionality like toggling the visibility of elements (now you see it, now you don’t) and updating parts of the page from a remote location (all that AJAX stuff).

it is built on the quite, quite wonderful Prototype framework (and the cool site design is nicked wholly from there).

It’s free and you can use it for pretty much anything – including commercial stuff. Just follow the simple instructions in the licence, OK?

So there you have it, unobtrusive JavaScript goodness for everyone. Let me know what you think.