Low Pro 0.4 Released

16 APR

I’m back from India and just dropping a quick note to say that Low Pro 0.4 is out. There are a few new features (which I’ll go into later) but essentially this is a bug fix / optimisation release and has many changes that help it work well with the latest version of Prototype. Most of this has been backing out parts of Low Pro that have been implemented or otherwise bettered in Prototype now which is great and I expect to see more of this happening soon. There’s some good work going on with events at the moment and DOM ready support is planned to go in soon.

One feature of Low Pro I have been using heavily myself are Behaviour classes. Behaviour classes allow you to attach behaviour to elements in an object orientated way. Each element gets it’s own instance of the behaviour which means that it can retain state through its lifetime without using expandos or creating nasty circular references that cause memory leaks (well, of course, you still can but it lessens the chances). I intend to write a lot more about behaviour classes shortly but in the meantime have a peek at the Draggable behaviour in SVN it turns out that it’s a really neat way to write components.

Download Low Pro 0.4

20 Comments (Closed)

Excellent!

Just a detail: the README file hasn’t been updated.

Ned Baldessin at 16.04.07 / 13PM

Low Pro… checkoutting right by now :) Thanks

ps: how is India ?

Sandro at 16.04.07 / 13PM

Sweet…I’ve been using the trunk version for a bit, but it’s nice to have the official release.

topfunky at 16.04.07 / 21PM

Dan, I like it a lot. But aren’t most of the methods in the DOM object redundant?

Andrew Dupont at 18.04.07 / 21PM

Andrew: Yes, they are somewhat now. They originally went in before Prototype had up(), down() etc so they were sorely needed them but now they are just in for backwards compatibility. I’m planning to phase most of those out in the next few versions.

Dan Webb at 18.04.07 / 22PM

Behavior classes are indeed the strong-sauce. I’ve been re-writing manually-wired event handlers in my app to use Behavior classes (and Behavior class generators FTW). Its pure fun. Keep the joy coming!

Adam Keys at 21.04.07 / 05AM

Totally support this project. Keep it up!

Scott Mackenzie at 10.05.07 / 01AM

Scott/Adam: Cheers for the support. I have been working on Low Pro a lot recently so keep bug reports and feature requests coming and keep and eye on the trunk.

I’m liking the way that as Prototype begins to support some Low Pro features I can pull them out of Low Pro and replace with new features.

Dan Webb at 10.05.07 / 02AM

what are the benefits of low pro compared to jquery ?

weepy at 18.05.07 / 07AM

hi, i just tried out lowpro. it works fine in firefox, but I get a “SyntaxError: Parse Error” in safari everytime i call a $tagname function like $div. any ideas that can help? or is safari not supported yet?

mutle at 23.05.07 / 14PM

mutle: The test suite runs fine in Safari (as does all my production code) so I suspect the problem might be specific to your script or way you are using it.

Post the code and I’ll take a look.

Dan Webb at 23.05.07 / 14PM

thanks for the fast reply, dan. here is the code (the line on which safari reports the syntax error is marked by ‘>’, it is not in the actual code :) )

Event.addBehavior({ > ‘textarea.editor’: function() { this.addBefore($div({ class: ‘editor_toolbar’}, ” “)); } });

mutle at 23.05.07 / 17PM

The bit that’s causing it not to work is the class: part. class is a reserved word in JavaScript so you need to use ‘class’ : ‘className’

Dan at 23.05.07 / 22PM

thank you, that fixed it. too bad safaris error messages are not more verbose, then I could have figured it out myself.

anyway, thanks for the help and for making lowpro.

mutle at 24.05.07 / 08AM

I had an issue with the lowpro.js 0.2 version in IE6. I don’t know of this is fixed in 0.4 but I wanted to inform you about it anyway:

The Event.addBehaviour function triggers a “both secure and unsecure” popup in IE6 for SSL sites, althought all scripts are served over https.

more info at: http://forum.textdrive.com/viewtopic.php?id=15921

I this a known/fixed bug?

Regards, Bas

Bas van Westing at 26.05.07 / 12PM