Prototype

An object-oriented JavaScript framework

Prototype is a JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. It offers a familiar class-style OO framework, extensive Ajax support, higher-order programming constructs, and easy DOM manipulation.

Targeted platforms

Prototype currently targets the following platforms:

Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows, version 6.0 and higher
Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and higher
Apple Safari 2.0.4 and higher
Opera 9.25 and higher
Chrome 1.0 and higher

Using Prototype

To use Prototype in your application, download the latest release from the Prototype web site (http://prototypejs.org/download) and copy dist/prototype.js to a suitable location. Then include it in your HTML like so:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/path/to/prototype.js"></script>

Building Prototype from source

prototype.js is a composite file generated from many source files in the src/ directory. To build Prototype, you'll need:

a copy of the Prototype source tree, either from a distribution tarball or from the Git repository (see below)
Ruby 1.8.2 or higher (http://www.ruby-lang.org/)
Rake--Ruby Make (http://rake.rubyforge.org/)
RDoc, if your Ruby distribution does not include it

From the root Prototype directory:

rake dist will preprocess the Prototype source using Sprockets and generate the composite dist/prototype.js
rake package will create a distribution tarball in the pkg/ directory

Contributing to Prototype

Check out the Prototype source with

$ git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/prototype.git
$ cd prototype
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update vendor/sprockets vendor/pdoc vendor/unittest_js

Find out how to contribute: http://prototypejs.org/contribute.

Documentation

Please see the online Prototype API: http://api.prototypejs.org.