The Spry Framework is an open source

Ajax framework Ajax may refer to: Greek mythology and tragedy * Ajax the Great, a Greek mythological hero, son of King Telamon and Periboea * Ajax the Lesser, a Greek mythological hero, son of Oileus, the king of Locris * ''Ajax'' (play), by the ancient Greek ...

developed by Adobe Systems which is used in the construction of

Rich Internet application A rich web application (originally called a rich Internet application, or RIA or installable Internet application) is a web application that has many of the characteristics of desktop application software. The concept is closely related to a sing ...

s. Unlike other pure

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

frameworks such as the

Dojo Toolkit Dojo Toolkit (stylized as dōjō toolkit) is an open-source modular JavaScript library (or more specifically JavaScript toolkit) designed to ease the rapid development of cross-platform, JavaScript/Ajax-based applications and web sites. It was s ...

and Prototype, Spry is geared towards

web designer Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code a ...

s, not web developers. On August 29, 2012, Adobe announced that it would no longer continue development of Spry and handed it over to the community on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

Components

The Spry framework broadly consists of * Spry Effects - animation effects like blind, fade, grow, highlight, shake, slide and squish. * Spry Data - data binding to HTML markup using minimal code or proprietary markup. Spry uses Google's

Xpath XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean v ...

JavaScript library to convert

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

into JavaScript objects. It can handle

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...

and JSON data. * Spry Widgets - framework for development of widgets, and included widgets such as the accordion.

Versions

Spry is currently in beta. The current version is 1.6.1. Spry prerelease 1.5 was released on May 17, 2007 On August 29, 2012, Adobe announced that they would discontinue investing in Spry, focusing on

jQuery jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML DOM tree traversal and manipulation, as well as event handling, CSS animation, and Ajax. It is free, open-source software using the permissive MIT License. As of Aug 2022, jQuery is u ...

instead.

Usage

The Spry framework is directly integrated into Adobe Systems's Dreamweaver CS3.Dreamweaver product page - reasons to upgrade
/ref> There is further speculation as to how Adobe will utilize the Spry codebase. Possible uses are: * Ajax development within an IDE such as

Eclipse (software) Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It is the second-most-popular IDE for Java development, and, u ...

. * Ajax generation from server code using ColdFusion.

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and we ...

offers similar functionality. * Ajax application generation from

Adobe Flex Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Initially developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe System ...

code.

OpenLaszlo OpenLaszlo is a discontinued open-source platform for the development and delivery of rich web applications. It is released under the Open Source Initiative certified Common Public License (CPL). The OpenLaszlo platform consists of the LZX pro ...

will offer similar functionality with their "Legals" release (version 4).

Competitors

Spry competes with a number of other Ajax frameworks and toolkits: * Atlas Framework from Microsoft * Ext JS * Dojo Toolkit * Echo * Google Web Toolkit * jQuery * MooTools * M and Script.aculo.us * YUI Library

References

External links