Rico, the Prototype-based UI JavaScript library, just released a first beta of their upcoming version 2.0.

Here’s what’s new:

  • Components: Rico 2.0 extends the component set from the previous versions. The LiveGrid has been expanded to include filtering, column resizing, and many more features. The core of Rico 2.0 has been designed to enable custom components to be more easily built.

  • Animation Effects: Rico 2.0 provides responsive animation for smooth effects and transitions that that can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Unlike most effects, Rico 2.0 animation can be interrupted, paused, resumed, or have other effects applied to it to enable responsive interaction that the user does not have to wait on.

  • Behaviors: Take some raw HTML and sprinkle in some behaviors and what do you get? Well in Rico you can easily build an Accordion component like those found in Macromedia Flex and Laszlo.

  • Styling: Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface.

  • Drag And Drop: Desktop applications have long used drag and drop in their interfaces to simplify user interaction. Rico provides one of the simplest interfaces for enabling your web application to support drag and drop. Just register any HTML element or JavaScript object as a draggable and any other HTML element or JavaScript object as a drop zone and Rico handles the rest.

  • AJAX Support: Rico provides a very simple interface for registering Ajax request handlers as well as HTML elements or JavaScript objects as Ajax response objects. Multiple elements and/or objects may be updated as the result of one Ajax request.

Rico 2.0 is based on the latest release of Prototype (currently version 1.5.1_rc2) which is included in the download.

I am really, really happy to see this project live again, as yet another example of the striving Prototype community, and possibly one of the best rewards we could get for the work we’ve put into Prototype 1.5, the upcoming 1.5.1 release and this very website.

So thank you Richard Cowin for resurrecting Rico and welcome to your new contributor: Matt Brown.