HTML::Prototype - AJAX Without JavaScript

John Wang — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 20:52:00 -0500

HTML::Prototype is by far the most painless way to get started with AJAX that I've found. Simply put, you do not need to know or write any JavaScript! HTML::Prototype is a Perl module on CPAN that wraps the prototype AJAX library and Script.aculo.us effects library with Perl helper methods so you don't need to write a single line of JavaScript to get some great effects. There are also a number of modules that wrap HTML::Prototype for integration with Catalyst, CGI::Application, Template Toolkit and others.

There are a number of convenient methods such as link_to_remote() and submit_to_remote() that create a link and form button to make an AJAX call and populate the innerHTML of a specified DOM element with the response body. Syntactic sugar to be sure as the JS generated by HTML::Prototype is very simple once you look at it, but the beauty is that you never have to.

To truly appreciate HTML::Prototype you need to use some of Scriptaculous' more advanced widgets such as autocomplete. Sebastian Riedel put together a screencast using Catalyst that demonstrates how easy it is to use. Links to the screencast are available on the Catalyst wiki movies page:

http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/wiki/Movies

Another great thing about having HTML::Prototype generate the JS syntax for you is that you can learn prototype syntax just by View Source. I picked up enough of prototype's JS syntax this way that I haven't looked at the docs yet.

I've recently removed HTML::Prototype from a project in favor of using prototype.js and scriptaculous.js directly and I'm evaluating the Dojo Toolkit but HTML::Prototype let me get started with very effective, painless AJAX functionality. I used it with Catalyst::Plugin::Prototype and thought 'this is how frameworks make you productive.' Thanks to all the contributors.

Dev411 Blog: HTML::Prototype - AJAX Without JavaScript

HTML::Prototype - AJAX Without JavaScript