Adobe Spry: Webmonkey First Look
We’ve got a new article up on Webmonkey today. It’s an overview of Adobe Labs’ new release, Spry. Spry is a JavaScript framework that lets designers and beginner-level programmers add Ajaxy behaviors to their sites quickly and easily without much coding. We first wrote about the release here on Monkey Bites.
Spry uses a simple structure that’s similar to other templated content environments such as Smarty. Spry offers a host of UI widgets, interaction behaviors, and scripted transition effects. All of the heavy coding is pre-fabricated. You just load the scripts onto your pages as includes, then call the behaviors in your layout. When you incorporate the Spry elements into your pages, all you have to do is position them with HTML and style them with CSS. You don’t really need to understand the inner workings of the Spry elements, but of course it helps.
Spry is still in pre-release, and it has some drawbacks (such as accessibility problems) but it shows promise as a way for designers to easily hop on Ajax bandwagon. And since Spry is an Adobe product, you can bet that it works with Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. However, Adobe has been careful, making sure that the Spry framework can be used with any development tool — even BBEdit and TextPad.
Check out number one Spry-guy Adam DuVander’s article, “Feelin’ Spry,” in which he builds a simple XML parsing page element and shows us how all the pieces fit together. Even though Spry is aimed at people who don’t regularly deal with a lot of code, you should have some knowledge of HTML, CSS, and basic Ajax concepts in order to get the most out of Adam’s tutorial.
Of course, we’d also love to hear what you think about Spry!
[graphic via Adobe Labs]
