DOM Assistant 2.0 released

In my article Learn JavaScript before tasting the library kool-aid from January this year, I ranted a bit about JavaScript libraries and mentioned Robert Nyman’s DOM Assistant as an alternative that looked interesting to me because of its focus on doing only the essential things and keeping size to a minimum.

Since the original release, Robert has listened to feedback from people using DOM Assistant and added some features to the library. It’s still smaller than most other libraries since it focuses on essential helper functions for DOM scripting. The result is DOM Assistant 2.0, announced in Releasing DOMAssistant 2.0 - Chainability, AJAX Module, DOMReady, XPath And More.

The new features are in the title of the announcement: chainability, an Ajax module, an easier-to-use DOMReady function, and XPath support. I could live without chainability since I think that is partly to blame for jQuery code being so hard for me to decipher. But it’s there now, so… just remember that you don’t have to use it.

I haven’t had the opportunity to use DOM Assistant extensively, but I like its focus on doing only the necessary stuff so I think it’s worth considering. And it’s modular, so you don’t have to include all of it if you know that you’re only going to use a few functions.

If you haven’t taken it for a test drive, check it out and let Robert know if you run into any problems or have suggestions for improvement. Any feedback of that kind should be sent to Robert, not to me ;-).

Demos, documentation, and the source are all available from the DOM Assistant site.

September 25, 2007
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Posted in JavaScript

Comments

1. September 25, 2007 by Dean Edwards

I'm glad he renamed it. It used to be called "DOMAss".

2. September 25, 2007 by Tombo

is this similar to jquery?

3. September 25, 2007 by jdbartlett

Not sure I've ever used more than 60% of Prototype on a site--for 80kb (the approximate difference between Prototype & Rob's Complete and uncompressed library) I'd be happy to fill some blanks.

4. September 25, 2007 by jdbartlett

@Tombo: Sort of. It's not as feature rich, but it's much lighter without compression. jQuery compresses quite nicely without Gzip using Dean Edwards' Packer or another 'eval' type compressor, but there is still decompression & processing overhead to be considered.

5. September 26, 2007 by Ian Lloyd

DOM Ass 2? I believe I saw a video with that title in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago ...

6. September 26, 2007 by Robert Nyman

Dean,

Yes, when I realized how serious I was about DOMAssistant I realized that I had to give it a proper name. :-)

Tombo,

To some degree. But while jQuery is more of a complete (and very competent) library where you're expected to use its methods for most things, DOMAssistant is more aimed at offering an easy, stable, lightweight and consistent way to code against the DOM and then build your own things on top of it.

For instance, DOMAssistant never alters the style property of any element; all presentation changes should be done through addClass and removeClass methods so you can always find all presentation-related code in your CSS files.

7. September 30, 2007 by Dustin Diaz

Hey, I like kool-aid.

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DOM Assistant 2.0 released

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