Introducing MooTools and MooFX

The Addons module provides four components; the DOM, Hash, Color and Common components. The most interesting of these components are the Hash and Color files. The Color component adds a range of properties that give you a great deal of control over the visual presentation of your on-page elements, allowing you to control not just the color, but the hue, saturation and other properties. The Hash script file creates a formal constructor that provides an easy method of creating associative arrays, which native JavaScript does not provide.

The Window component adds a couple of modules that make working with the native window object a little more effective and a little easier. The Window.Base module allows you to add functions that react to the DOM loading with the domready event. The Window.Size module provides a simple, cross-browser method of obtaining various properties of the window.

The Remote module deals with anything that happens externally to the browser window and contains modules that handle AJAX, cookies, Json (with another component for remote Json) and XHR. It also provides an Assets component that deals primarily with the dynamic loading of images and external files such as CSS or JavaScript files. An AJAX class has been developed for the library which contains properties used to handle all of your asynchronous requests, and deal with the server responses easily and efficiently.

The next and largest module is the effects module; as this is available as a separate download in some cases, I'll describe the contents of the components that make up this module in the MooFX section below.

Next the Drag module provides two components to extend drag and drop capabilities without resorting to DHTML. Two modules make up this component and provide classes that easily make any DOM element drag and droppable or resizable, as well as a couple of properties that can be adjusted to achieve your desired result with a minimum of hassle.

The final module, Plugins, is the closest the library comes to providing a set of pre-built solutions and gives you a series of components that allow you to easily add common sought-after effects such as the accordion style of the MooFX web page, a scroller and a slider, automatic tool tips and a module that makes it easy to allow user-sortable lists.