Ever since the initial announcement of the documentation effort, we’ve been busy planning and preparing Prototype for its rebirth. Along with the official 1.5 release, we’d like to welcome you to the official home of Prototype. This site will serve as the center of our community and help developers everywhere become familiar with Prototype and its continued progress.

Prototype 1.5 release

We’ve been squashing some nasty bugs getting ready for the 1.5 release. You can get the full scoop on all the fixes and improvements in the CHANGELOG.

The API gets documentation

While there has always been some great documentation on Prototype, we’ve been the victim of a famous quote from *“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”:

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

We’re moving past those times, however. We’ve worked really hard to fully document the API. This is something we’ll be improving over time, but it’s a great start. Here are some of the features:

Guessable URLs

The documentation site has guessable URLs. For instance, if you’re looking for documentation on Element.show, then you can find that documentation at a url like: http://prototypejs.org/api/element/show. If you’re looking for Form.Element.focus you can find it at: http://prototypejs.org/api/form/element/focus.

Atom feeds

Each Object has its own atom feed. This opens the doors for integrated documentation. For instance, if you want the XML file for Form.Element, you can find it at: http://prototypejs.org/feed/api/form/element/atom.xml. This feed will always contain the most up-to-date documentation for Form.Element.

Tips and Tutorials

We’ve also added an article section where you can find tips, tutorials, and a variety of articles for Prototype. We plan on adding many more articles to this area over time, so keep your eyes peeled.

A special thanks

We’ve added three new core members to our team. Chris, Mislav, and Tobie were already avid contributors to Prototype, and they were the driving force behind the documentation effort. We all worked really hard on it, but these guys deserve most of the credit.

Rough around the edges

We’re not perfect, so if you catch any spots in the documentation that are incorrect, or if you’d like to improve parts of the documentation shoot one of us an email. We’ll try to get an official email posted later so you can send in improvements or additions to the documentation. Until then, please enjoy the site!

Update: Rails 1.2 has been announced and includes Prototype 1.5 with the release! Congrats to the Rails team.