[Catalyst] Spending time with Catalyst (slightly OT)

[Roman]

Matthieu Codron wrote:
> Roman a écrit :
>> Check jQuery. It's better than all of the other libraries combined. 
>> Reminds me of Catalyst ways as well. Its a framework, but it's not 
>> limiting, you can do whatever you want your own ways. And it's 
>> extendibles by plugins. Just released a stable version 1. Strong 
>> community as well. Mailing list gets 100-200 message a day.
>>
>> B10m wrote:
>>   
>>> * Matthieu Codron <matthieu at codron.org> [2006-09-09 14:27:45+0200]
>>>     
>>>> I routinely develop Catalyst stuff for my own purposes and I find out 
>>>> that I am spending much more time actually working on the client side 
>>>> stuff ( HTML, CSS and Javascript ) than on the server side.
>>>> Have some of you the same feeling? Ever since playing with Ajax stuff, I 
>>>> have the firm impression that while I now have a decent framework on the 
>>>> server side, the client side is now where I spend most of my development 
>>>> time ... 
>>>>       
>>> [...]
>>>
>>> Recently, I found myself pondering that too. I now too spend (too)
>>> much time on client side stuff. I've been messing with the Yahoo!
>>> User Interface Library (yui)[1] and found it quite exciting,
>>> especially in combination with the (unofficial) Extensions Library[2].
>>>
>>> It's not as hyped as del.icio.us and Prototype, yet it also gets the
>>> job done nicely. Might be worth looking into.
>>>
>>>   1. http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/
>>>   2. http://jackslocum.com/yui/
>>>     
> I knew about YUI but I kind of overlooked it ... As for jQuery, you 
> still need to code a lot, isn't it?
> 
> Thanks a lot, and keep the good tips coming ;-)

Yes, you need to code, but not a lot. There is a lot of abstraction and 
also an easy way to select elements. You can use xpath and css selectors 
to find objects and then iterate over them easily. For example:

// find users in a first list and run a function on it
$('div.users ul:first li').each(function(){
alert('found user ' + $(this).text());
});

// find even row tables and add class to them (zebra tables)
$('table tr:even').addClass('even');

As I mentioned as well, it has tons of plug-ins and instant code in the 
mailing list.