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Entry posted on Mar 15 by .V1

Past

A small status update on spry-it.com. When I created the first blog post on Adobe groups it stated that Spry-it.com would run on Aptana Jaxer, a serverside JavaScript and DOM engine. With the removal of Jaxer from the Aptana Studio the future got uncertain and i decided to go to more stable engine as base for Spry-it.

Future

Expression Engine is now our engine of choice and we are working hard on porting the existing code base to PHP. And its coming alone nicely and we hope to release it before Spry 1.7 goes live. There is still much work to be done thats why I'm also proud to announce that as of today, Johns Beharry will be helping out Spry-it as official co-manager. He creates cool stuff on a rock in the Caribbean, he's a talented web developer with a strong sense for design, front-end development and has experiance with the Expersion Engine. If you have questions or just like to chat with him feel free to following (stalk) him on twitter @johnsbeharry or AIM him at johnsbeharry@mac.com.

Now

Because our time zones differ so much, there will always be one of us online to answer your questions related the the Spry-it.com usergroup. You can reach the both of us at team@spry-it.com.

Spry 1.7 Pre-Release sneak preview
Entry posted on Mar 04 by .V1 , tagged Development,Interactive Experience,Rich Internet Apps

I'ts been more than year since the last revision of the Spry library. The last preview of Spry 1.7 originates from 12/08/08. A rewrite of the xpath handling inside SpryXMLDataSet took place, eliminating the need of the xpath.js library. Most people where and are wondering if Spry might have been discontinued which was never the case. The Spry team is also part of the Dreamweaver development team so they have allot of priorities to for fill. But I'm proud to announce that new builds of the Spry library has been spotted in the wild!

Mysterious extensions for Dreamweaver started requiring a "Widget browser" to be downloaded. After taking closer look at the pages I noticed the header: "Dreamweaver Widget Browser/Open Ajax Widgets". This actually started to ring a bell with me, I noticed that Adobe is actively involved in the Open Ajax initiative, especially KinBlas the main developer of the Spry framework. The puzzle pieces seem to fall in place now.

One of the extensions listed in this Open Ajax category contained information on how to download the item without the requiring Widget Browser. After Downloading and unzipping the "Spry Content Slide Show" extension and navigate to assets/includes you will notice various of new Spry files.

When you open SpryWidget.js you will notice the upgrade license header:

// SpryWidget.js - version 0.14 - Spry Pre-Release 1.7

This the one of the base modules of the newly rumoured widget framework that the Spry team has been working on. The SpryWidget.js depends on the SpryDOMUtils.js modules for navigating the DOM using the Spry.$$ css selector engine and other various of utilities. The SpryWidget.js will provide the base class of all new and future widgets. After closer inspection you will notice that the Spry.Wiget.Base is based on the Spry Notifier or Observer class. This allows the widgets to send out different events where you can subscribe to making the widgets asynchronous.

The Spry.Widget.Base provides you with different methods for developing your widgets such as:

getElements
getElementsByClassName
getElementChildren
groupContentByDelimeter
createElement

And multiple slice functions for creating different element containers. As you will see the Spry.Widget.Base is will make it easier and faster to build widgets. An example implementation can be found at the bottom of the SpryWidget.js.

As i stated in a few paragraphs above the Spry Widget framework depends on the SpryDOMUtils.js module. There are noticeable upgrades made there as well. The one's that cought my attention where the upgrades to set and getAttributes these add support for custom attributes creation in Safari 2+. Creating support

for Unobtrusive Spry Data in Safari. Making the most reliable cross browser option for validating your Spry Pages. One other noticeable enhancement is that the Spry.$$ selector engine now allows you to send HTML elements to the function so they can be wrapped in to the Spry.$$'s result methods.

One other remarkable file and the last one that we are going to discuss today is the SpryDOMEffects.js. Its also based on the SpryDOMUtils.js so you need to have that included in to your page before using. Its smaller and more powerful than the SpryEffects.js, so I'm expecting this to replace the SpryEffects.js completely overtime. It might not happen in the 1.7 final release but in the near future it would be possible. The file includes it own animation engine and CSS animation engine. Animating CSS properties are now possible using the SpryDOMEffects unlocking a whole range of new possibilities for Spry and future widgets.

Spry 1.7 will be one of the upgrades Spry has been waiting for.

Thanks Steve for sharing your great find on Spry 1.7.