Learning JavaScript

Sabre’s Rico

Rico is a rather interesting Ajax library. For one thing, unlike many other Ajax libraries, which are the inspiration of an individual or small group of individuals, Rico was created by a development team at Sabre Airline Solution. Developed by company personnel, it was released for general use via the Apache license.

Rico, like other libraries we’ll examine, is dependent on Prototype. At the time this was written, Rico was at Version 1.1.2 and was dependent on Prototype 1.4.0. I tried the examples with the Prototype 1.5 release candidate.

After installing Prototype, access Rico from the library’s web site at http://openrico.org/rico/home.page. Once downloaded, include both libraries in your page using the following in the head section of your document, before any JS that uses the libraries:

<script type="text/javascript"
     src="/pathto/prototype.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
     src="/pathto/rico.js">
</script>

What I especially like about Rico is the very easy-to-use cinematic effects. Among these are animators that position elements, fade colors, and especially, round corners, which I thought was rather unusual, but not surprising, with an Ajax library.

We’ll take a couple of these effects out for a test drive, starting with that rounded-corner library.

Rounded Corners

The difficulty with the Rico library is that not all of the functionality provided is documented. However, the JavaScript library is simple to read (if you’re familiar with Prototype), and the ...