Prototype 1.6.1 RC3: Chrome support and PDoc
Today we’re announcing Release Candidate 3 of Prototype 1.6.1. Among the highlights of this release are official Chrome support, improved IE8 compatibility, faster generation of API documentation with PDoc, and lots of bug fixes.
Chrome support
Since Google Chrome is a close sibling of Safari, Prototype has had excellent Chrome compatibility ever since the browser was first released. Now we’re making it official: Prototype supports Chrome 1.0 and greater.
If you have Chrome installed on your system (Windows only for now, even though early alphas exist for Mac), invoking rake test will run the unit tests in all locally-installed browsers, including Chrome. To run the unit tests in Chrome alone, try rake test BROWSERS=chrome.
Generate your own docs with PDoc
It’s been a long, strange trip for PDoc, the inline-doc tool that will soon be for Prototype and script.aculo.us what RDoc is for Rails. It started as Tobie’s brainchild over a year ago, but key contributions from James Coglan and Samuel Lebeau have helped to carry it across the finish line.
PDoc was a part of RC2, but has since been updated to make doc generation much, much faster. On my machine, a process that used to take 20 minutes now takes only 60 seconds. Furthermore, we’ve solved a couple of minor issues that made it hard to build the docs on Windows.
Ever since Prototype 1.5, we’ve kept our documentation in Mephisto, the same engine that powers the rest of the site (and this blog). It’s served us well, but it meant that updating the docs became a chore that could only be started once we’d released a particular version. PDoc will make it far easier to maintain our documentation — and far easier to keep archival copies of the docs for older versions of Prototype.
Upon final release of 1.6.1, we’ll put the generated docs on this site, just like Rails hosts its most recent stable documentation. Until then, you can generate your own local docs by checking out the full source and running rake doc from the command line.
Other improvements
There have also been a number of bugs fixed since RC2 — including a heinous bug relating to Event#observe — and a number of key optimizations. We’ve further improved IE8 compatibility, solving some edge-case issues that popped up since RC2. Credit goes to Juriy (kangax), our newest team member, for working tirelessly these last few months to make 1.6.1 faster and less reliant on browser sniffs.
Download, report bugs, and get help
- Download Prototype 1.6.1 RC3
- Submit bug reports to Lighthouse
- Get Prototype help on the mailing list or
#prototypeIRC channel - Interact with the Core Team on the protoype-core mailing list
Thanks to the many contributors who made this release possible!
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Comments
Supper :) congratulations
Congrats to the whole team! Can’t wait for 1.6 and scripty on PDoc. You did an amazing job with bugfixes and browser sniff drop.
Hi,
nice job!
But is scriptaculous 1.8.2 working with this release? Or do I have to wait until the final version?
Great news! Can’t wait for the final release! :-D
Wasn’t expecting another release candidate. Hopefully 1.6.1 will be there sometime soon, Google doesn’t host RC’s so it’s still serving everyone 1.6.0.3
Cool, I can’t wait for the final release now :)
Awesome! When can we expect the final release?
Lovely, thanks for all the work you put into this awesome library.
I second Gizzz’s question though… is this version compatible with scriptaculous 1.8.2? Anyone know?
Thank you for work!
I am the only one who thinks that - Prototype documentation is to die for. Absolutely the best, one of major selling points. - Prototype documentation looks and feels very good, and PDoc looks… weird. - Thus, changing documentation from slick current to PDoc will worsen things considerably?
If someone is needed, I’d volunteer to take care of documentation on site if it’s kept as it is. You can have separate PDoc one, but this should stay.
@Илья Казначеев: Prototype’s documentation is a work in progress. So is PDoc. Please feel free to help us improve both. The current docs are a nightmare to maintain so they will have to go.
Is there a way to generate docs with PDoc which look like current ones? Because traditional framed PDoc output looks like crap :-/
And maybe it’s hard to maintain because it’s actually very good? Good costs.
@Илья Казначеев: I think you’re confusing Pdoc (Perl’s documentation system) and PDoc (Prototype’s documentation system). The beauty of PDoc is that you can output anything you wish.
FWIW, a documentation system that’s hard to maintain is by definition not very good. Need a proof? Prototype’s current documentation is not up to date.
PDoc will allow us to accept documentation patches. It will also enable us to commit code changes and relevants documentation changes at the same time. In turn, this guarantees up to date documentation and archiving of docs for previous versions of Prototype (thanks to versioning).
@Илья Казначеев: It depends on what you like about the current docs. If it’s the layout, then you’ll be able to write a PDoc template that mimics that layout.
If it’s the fact that the current docs are more comprehensive and have more examples, then you needn’t worry — we’re aiming to make the new docs just as comprehensive. It’ll just take some time.
Thanks for this new candidate release, I’m testing it right now!
Currently, we also document our classes based over Prototype and script.aculo.us using NaturalDocs (http://www.naturaldocs.org). Nevertheless, this latter does not fit all requirements to document Prototype-based code.
PDoc seems an interesting alternative but the installation process is complicated (cf. Treetop) and even impossible in a Windows environment (unless you provide some Linux tools). Do you plan to release some PDoc bundle/installer for Windows?
And congratulations to kangax, an excellent reference!
The current documentation is indeed very good and nice to use. I’m glad to hear that the new system means that they’ll be more up to date and just as well documented in terms of examples. Also, I think you should have a separate place in the docs for deprecated methods (or a way to better segregate them from the rest). Thanks guys for this release, looking forward to 1.6.1 final.
@Pedro: installation on windows should be flawless. What issues have you encountered? Please submit PDoc bugs to the relevant bugtracker.
@Bertrand: There a tag to mark methods as deprecated in PDoc.
Element.up, Element.down, Element.previous, and Element.next is “undefined” in Prototype 1.6.1 RC3 using Chrome but works in Version 1.6.0.2.
ex: $(o.id).down(‘a’)
@Tobie:
Some error was thrown when installing treetop through RubyGems (rake and BlueCloth installed successfully, this was about 2 months ago). But, I just gave it another try and it worked! Don’t ask why…
I’ve just generated the sample PDoc documentation and it looks perfect for my needs after some template adaptation (it lacks a bit of usability IMHO).
Thanks for all the great job!
@Илья Казначеев
An excellent live implementation of PDoc is available now that Scripty2 Alpha is live:
http://scripty2.com/doc/scripty2%20fx/s2/fx/transitions.html
@Pedro: I definitely agree regarding the usability issue of PDoc templates. Remember this is alpha software and please consider contributing some of your changes!
what is the expected date of releasing prototype 1.6.1.
I am looking forward to the final release, because then Google will have it on their server!
Yes! You guys rule!
Really awesome. Thanks for all the hard work. I really appreciate it!
You’ve set a high bar with the current documentation, when the new documentation comes out, it’ll no doubt not be as easy to read, well, designed, colored, typeset or thorough. Why not just skin a wiki or do something not generated by those icky scripts? I’m terrified that a major selling point of prototype is about to be replaced by something orders less in quality!!!