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This library provides useful JavaScript classes for dealing with:

• Popup windows, lightboxes, “busy” feedback messages
• Contextual help
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Form enhancements for searching selects, adding resizers to textareas
• “Controller” abstraction, to help you encapsulate your JavaScript behaviour for sections on your site
• Loading and management of “remote forms” – create/edit/delete forms hosted on your server that you want to display as a popup with Ajax

It also provides pre-processor scripts for integrating the library with your project.

The aims of this library are:

• To unite the reusable JavaScript in my applications
• To improve the encapsulation in JavaScript code
• To make the relationship between the application and JavaScript more obvious
• To provide a rich set of tools for enhancing web applications

AzukiLib is comprised of:

• JavaScript classes
• A set of images for icons and feedback messages
• Example CSS
• Unit tests
• Rake tasks for producing a single library file (with boilerplate comments removed), and installing the css, images and javascripts into your project

This library depends on Prototype.

Controllers

I split the code in my projects up into controllers. Controllers generally map to a Rails controller. They’re automatically loaded and run by matching the document body ID to your controller:

• HTML body ID set to Tasks
• Azuki attempts to load TasksController and call its run method. If it’s a class, it will instantiate the class instead.

My Rails projects generally set the body ID to the name of the controller to make it easier to specialise generalised CSS. It’s also helped me keep my JavaScript reusable across projects.

Usage

You can use the JavaScript files in src/ in part or the entire thing as azukilib.js. Build azukilib.js like this:

rake azukilib:compile

The config.yml file is expected to contain various settings, including:

• The location of your project which you’re going to use Azuki with.
• Locations for your project’s CSS, images and JavaScript files.
• insert_css: Add Azuki’s CSS to your project’s CSS file (rather than loading multiple files to cut down the number of remote requests). CSS already added by Azuki will be replaced.
• image_relative: Azuki’s pre-processor will replace image paths in azuki.css and azukilib.js so you can keep Azuki’s example images separate to your project’s images.

Background

AzukiLib is a set of libraries used by Helicoid Limited’s web applications:

• Tiktrac – Timesheets for businesses:
• Ebiwrite – Tools for translators
• Helipad – A simple web notepad
• And probably a lot more

History

• 25 April 2009: Added to GitHub
• 11 December 2007: Basic unit tests added, started work on cleaning up the API, imported into repository
• 10 December 2007: Extraction from Tiktrac/Ebiwrite started
• Early 2007: Library created by extracting code from Helicoid’s products

License

This project is placed in the public domain.