After almost a year in development, the MooTools team announced the release of version 1.3 with major notable enhancements.
Slick Selector Engine
The biggest update is the inclusion of the new Slick standalone selector engine. The engine was developed by Thomas Aylott, Fabio Costa and Valerio Proietti with accuracy and portability in mind, allowing the engine to not only provide MooTools developers with excellent selector support but also the ability for it to be included in other projects as well. The MooTools team created over 3,000 tests to ensure that even the most obscure scenarios were considered. The inclusion of Slick also allowed the team to extend the Element method to allow creation of DOM elements using complex CSS selector expressions. Very cool!
Core Updates
The MooTools team also focused on enhancing the core API in preparation for MooTools 2.0 by deprecated every $- prefixed function and nd moving those to the relevant natives namespaces:
We have revised the whole base of our library to speed up MooTools, to provide an even more beautiful API and to make our library future-proof. In order to reduce the amount of global variables we have moved all $-prefixed functions into their according namespace ($splat » Array.from, …). In short we think that with 1.3 you are getting the best MooTools experience ever.
New Build Manager
Building a new version of MooTools has always been easy using the builder and now it's been improved via the new Packager preprocessor which allows you to create custom MooTools builds from Github repositories. It handles code dependencies and already provides support for several MooTools plugins. The new Packager is a PHP 5.2+ library but can also be found as a Python app thanks to Aaron Newton's work.
MooTools Runner
To make sure that MooTools continues to adhere to the projects's specifications, Christoph Pojer & Arian Stolwijk spent some time over the summer building a new spec testing engine called MooTools Runner which has been adopted by all major MooTools projects - Core, More and Slick. The engine is based on Jasmine and runs all specs within just 2 seconds. In addition, code coverage was increased to about 95%, ensuring excellent test coverage for Core.
Download it!
Once you're ready, you can grab the latest version of MooTools or roll your own via the following links:
- Download MooTools Core 1.3
- Build MooTools Core 1.3
- Build MooTools More 1.3RC
- Update from 1.2 to 1.3 with 1.2 compatibility.
- Upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 and drop 1.2 compatibility.
- Fork / clone MooTools 1.3 from GitHub, and build it yourself with Packager.
- Read the commit logs to see precisely what has changed.
- Browse the Documentation for Core & More.