Introducing MooTools and MooFX

MooTools version 1.0 (the current version) was first officially released to the world on March 21, 2007, although it was available and much discussed for some time prior to this. It is hailed as a super lightweight web 2.0 JavaScript framework aimed at providing pre-built web solutions that save you time and effort on the development front. It was produced by the Mad4Milk developers Valerio Proietti, Aaron Newton and Harald Kirschner and is already being used by some high profile organizations such as CNet and Ubuntu (which recently had a big announcement itself concerning Dell computers).

It has been released under the highly open source MIT license. This leaves you free to do pretty much whatever you want to do to the library including modify, distribute and even sell it. Just in case you're wondering, the moo in MooTools stands for My Object Oriented (JavaScript).

Moo.fx² is a bolt-on JavaScript effects library, also produced by the Mad4Milk development team that allows you to implement quick and easy but visually stimulating effects to your web pages. The main push on this additional library is its size, or rather lack of size; being just 3KB small. A great benefit is that it can be used not just in conjunction with MooTools, but also with the popular Prototype library. Again, this is completely open source and available under the MIT license.

Both libraries are small, fast, standards compliant and cross-browser friendly. Using them can cut down dramatically on the amount of time that you need to spend writing raw code. You can come up with a simple function call that will work in a wide range of browsers without resorting to custom code targeted at specific platforms. For an excellent showcase of what you can achieve with these libraries, visit either the mooTools or mooFX sites, both of which are built upon the technologies and effects found within them.