Book Image

MooTools 1.3 Cookbook

By : Jay L Johnston
Book Image

MooTools 1.3 Cookbook

By: Jay L Johnston

Overview of this book

MooTools is a JavaScript framework that abstracts the JavaScript language. JavaScript itself, complex in syntax, provides the tools to write a layer of content interaction for each different browser. MooTools abstracts those individual, browser-specific layers to allow cross-browser scripting in an easy-to-read and easy-to-remember syntax. Animation and interaction, once the domain of Flash, are being taken by storm by the MooTools JavaScript framework, which can cause size, shape, color, and opacity to transition smoothly. Discover how to use AJAX to bring data to today's web page users who demand interactivity without clunky page refreshes. When searching for animation and interactivity solutions that work, MooTools 1.3 Cookbook has individual, reusable code examples that get you running fast! MooTools 1.3 Cookbook readies programmers to animate, perform AJAX, and attach event listeners in a simple format where each section provides a clear and cross-browser compatible sketch of how to solve a problem, whether reading from beginning to finish or browsing directly to a particular recipe solution. MooTools 1.3 Cookbook provides instant solutions to MooTools problems – whatever you want to do with MooTools, this book will tell you how to do it. MooTools 1.3 Cookbook is presented in a progressive order that builds concepts and ideas, while simultaneously being a collection of powerful individual, standalone, recipe solutions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
MooTools 1.3 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Making a Corvette out of a car—extending the base class


The "base class" is a function, a method, that allows extension. Just what does extending a class entail? Buckle up and let us take a drive.

Getting ready

Just to show the output of our work, create a DIV that will be our canvas.

<div id="mycanvas"></div>

How to do it...

Creating a class from the base class is as rudimentary as this: var Car = new Class();. That is not very instructive, so at the least, we add the constructor method to call at the time of instantiation: initialize.

<script type="text/javascript">
var Car = new Class({
initialize: function(owner) {
this.owner = owner;
}
});

Note

The constructor method takes the form of a property named initialize and must be a function; however, it does not have to be the first property declared in the class.

How it works...

So far in our recipe, we have created an instance of the base class and assigned it to the variable Car. We like things to be sporty, of course. Let's...