From ProtoScript

What is Protoscript?

Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web. With Protoscript it's easy to bring interface elements to life. Simply connect them to behaviors and events to create complex interactions.

The goal of protoscript is not just to provide a library for prototyping rich interactions. The main purpose is to build a simple, yet rich tools on top of the library to make it easier for designers, product managers, business owners and all the non-techies to experiment with different interaction techniques-- without coding.

Protoscript is flexible. It can be used directly by developers to create interactive prototypes. Since the language encapsulates a set of interactions in a formalized manner, I envision others building on top of the library in a number of ways:

• Using the plugin architecture provide complete behavior libraries for other toolkits (like MooTools, MochiKit, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, Ext, as well as others)
• Using the plugin architecture provide different selector technologies for CSS or XPath selection
• Provide a simple parser for the grammar to turn interactions back into english equivalence-- enabling providing visual tooltips for describing the interaction that has been added to the page or the generation of requirements documents
• Richer user interfaces (beyond the trivial bookmarklet currently supplied.) I am actually working on a sophisticated interface that is reminiscent to adding animations to keynote or powerpoint to make it simple to wire a page.

You can read my blog article, Why Protoscript? for the rationale behind the framework.

Author

Protoscript was created by Bill Scott. You can find out more about my other work from my Looks Good Works Well blog.

Getting Started

Documentation

The left hand navigation contains links that explain the current and growing set of default behaviors.

Soon to come: how to add your own behaviors, how to author new behavior sets.

Demos

For working examples, check out our demos section.

Download

To download the latest version of Protoscript, go to the download section.

Presentation

The latest version of the Protoscript presentation was at the Rich Web Experience.