Global Moxie

February 1, 2007—Now available: A PDF version of the API documentation for Prototype 1.5, the sweet JavaScript framework for serious web developers.

In January, version 1.5 of the Prototype JavaScript framework hit the streets, adding a host of sublime new features to the open-source code library. And for the first time, the Prototype team also published complete online documentation of the framework's objects and methods.

The framework makes the web a better place to work for developers like me, and I'm pleased to make this small contribution to the Prototype ecosystem.

The quality and attention to detail of the documentation are obvious. As a guy who likes this kind of thing on paper, my only disappointment was that there was no PDF version. So I threw together a quick Perl script to download the content, convert it to docbook XML and whip it into a tidy little PDF of 166 pages.

I figured others might find this useful, too, and with the permission of the Prototype team, I'm sharing it with you.

So what's Prototype? The creation of Sam Stephenson and a core team of open-source developers, Prototype is a JavaScript framework that takes the pain out of coding JavaScript by papering over browser differences and filling gaps in the language itself.

The framework makes the web a better place to work for developers like me, and I'm pleased to make this small contribution to the Prototype ecosystem.