DOM Assistant updated to 2.5, adds CSS selector support
Last week I posted a brief article about what you might want to think about when Choosing a JavaScript framework, and mentioned Robert Nyman’s DOM Assistant as one of the JavaScript libraries that I have used in production.
It’s been just three months since Robert released version 2.0 of his library, but since then he has been working hard on improving DOM Assistant even more. And that hard work has led to this week’s announcement: DOMAssistant 2.5 Released - CSS Selector Support, New AJAX Methods And More Goodies Added!.
If you read Robert’s post you will notice that there are plenty of new features and performance tweaks, but the most useful addition to me is definitely support for CSS selectors. As anyone who has used a library/framework that has support for CSS selectors will testify, it is often a lot quicker to write a CSS selector that matches the elements you want to work with than doing it “by hand”. So thanks for adding that feature, Robert. I’m sure I will be using it a lot.
For a few months I’ve been using DOM Assistant 2.0 almost daily, and I have been happy with what it does. Unfortunately I have only had limited time to beta test version 2.5, but I’m looking forward to putting it to the test once I manage to find some time.
Anyway, if you’re interested in a comparatively lightweight JavaScript library that focuses more on helping you out with the tedious parts of scripting than adding cool effects and UI widgets, give DOM Assistant a try.
And please, no “my library is better than yours” trolling. There are many libraries to choose from, and to each his own. No need for a war.
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Roger Johansson is a Swedish web professional specialising in web standards, accessibility, and usability. More about me and this site.
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Comments
Exciting. Thanks for mentioning. :)
We are about to set up working guidelines for upcoming projects at work, and the libraries we have used until now is more like useless bytes to download instead of actually making things any better for anyone.
Looks like DOMAssistant is a good candidate.
I was just wondering. What javascript editor are you using? I'm getting more and more familiar with the DOM, but i would really like an editor with some autocomplete features to avoid small typing errors and such.
Any suggestions?
Give Aptana a try, great IDE based on eclipse. Very useful for any front-end development.
Roger,
Thanks for the mentioning, and I'm sincerely glad that you like it! :-)
Morten,
Trying to avoid sounding pretentious now, but the available DOM methods are so few so it's pretty easy to learn them by heart (won't help typing errors, though).
What would be nice for different JavaScript libraries to have autocomplete support in editors. Any takers, anyone?
I use a Mac as my main computer and I'm very happy with the customizing options I get with bundles to have code snippets available for the things I want to avoid typing over and over (functions, for loops etc). On a PC, I use HomeSite to get close to this functionality with snippets.
Morten: I use TextMate for almost all of my coding needs.
Robert: You know me, I wouldn't say that I like it if I didn't ;-).
There are TextMate bundles for both YUI and jQuery.
Ah, cool. Now someone needs to create one for DOMAssistant then. ;-)
If you want the features from textmate on windows you can use http://www.e-texteditor.com/
One feature I really like about Aptana is the ability to create Code Assist Profiles. Basically Aptana reads the javascript files you include in the profile and adds the functions included in them to the auto-complete feature included in the js editor. So far I've been too in love with TextMate's snippets to fully switch over to Aptana, but I think the code profiles are a great feature.
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