Prototype Useful Features
Let's look now at what Prototype can do specifically for us to develop a Dynamic Web Application.
Cross Browser Support:
While doing JavaScript programming, it is required to handle different Web Browsers differently. Prototype Library has been written in such a way that it takes care of all the compatibility issues and you can do cross browser programming without any hassle.
The Document Object Model:
Prototype provides helper methods that ease some of the strain of DOM programming. Using Prototype, you can manipulate DOM very easily.
HTML Forms:
With Ajax, other input mechanisms, such as drag and drop, can be used as part of a conversation between the browser and the server. With conventional JavaScript programming it is difficult to capture these inputs and pass them to the server. Prototype provides a set of utilities for working with HTML forms.
JavaScript Events:
Prototype provides some excellent cross-browser support when coding events, and also extends the Function object to make it easy to work with event handling.
Ajax Utilities:
The most important feature of Prototype is it's support for Ajax. All major browsers support a version of the XMLHttpRequest object that makes Ajax possible, either as an ActiveX component or as a native JavaScript object.
XMLHttpRequest, however, exposes the HTTP protocol at a very low level, which gives the developer a lot of power, but also requires her to write a lot of code in order to do simple things.
Prototype uses it's own object inheritance system to provide a hierarchy of Ajax helper objects, with more generic base classes being subclassed by more focused helpers that allow the most common types of Ajax request to be coded in a single line.
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