Building a Content Management System with Prototype

Introduction

If you're a web developer who builds JavaScript applications on a frequent basis, then it's quite probable that you've already heard about the neat features that come packaged with the popular Prototype library. To be frank, this powerful software can be a real time saver when it comes to creating JavaScript-based routines that will be incorporated to the behavioral layers of certain web sites. It definitely must be considered as a serious contender among the huge variety of third-party packages available on the web these days.

With the impressive proliferation of AJAX-driven applications, it's an undeniable fact that Prototype has found an important place inside the toolbox of many web developers, particularly because of its remarkable capacities for working with HTTP requester objects, array structures, online forms, and of course JSON-based programs, to name a few.

However, if you've been using this JavaScript package for a while in the development of your own web applications, then I'm pretty sure that you'll be aware of its excellent characteristics, which can be exploited in all sorts of clever ways.

And now, speaking more specifically about the impressive group of features that come bundled with the Prototype framework, over the course of this series, which is comprised of three articles, I'm going to show you how to develop a highly expansible content management system that can be used to handle any kind of data.

In this case in particular, the CMS in question will be implemented to administer  data related to publishable articles, including authors and titles. It will allow the insertion, updating and deletion of all this data with the assistance of the powerful Prototype's AJAX.Updater object and a simple MySQL database. The system can also be easily tuned to manage contents of a different nature.

Now that you know how I plan to use the robust AJAX capacities integrated with the Prototype JavaScript framework, let's learn together how to build this expandable content management system. Let's begin this educational journey now!