script.aculo.us is nearing its 1.6 release.

Hundreds of thousands of downloads, packaged with Ruby on Rails and other frameworks, and as standalone package, and 10,000+ del.icio.us links speak for themselves—great to see that kind of usage and support!

script.aculo.us 1.6 marks the switch over to Prototype 1.5 (1.4 will no longer be supported), which has really great new features and has undergone some refactoring to take advantage of the Prototype 1.5 niceties.

Other new stuff includes window-scrolling while dragging, performance optimizations and various bug fixes.

To see some cool combinations of the new Prototype features with the latest script.aculo.us 1.6 beta, see example 1 and example 2 (from the functional test suite).

I’m welcoming test reports, so if you have an app using script.aculo.us, get the newest files from SVN and try if everything works smoothly.

The final version of script.aculo.us 1.6 will be released with Ruby on Rails 1.1 final, which shouldn’t be too far ahead. :)

Oh, and don’t forget that you can stay updated on when it’s released by subscribing to the script.aculo.us RSS feed.

Aytekin Tank has released JotForm, a web-based tool to create form.

From the announcement:

I am very excited to announce that the first web based WYSIWYG form builder JotForm BETA is now released.

Although implementing the first real web WYSIWYG form editor was a very interesting task by itself, it is not that useful. All form building tools on the web provide data collection and access. So does JotForm. It is really easy to see results on the my forms section and you can even export them as Excel, CVS or some other delimited format. You can also receive notification emails.

JotForm is built on top of two super cool JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

An other really, really cool example of how Prototype and script.aculo.us can be put to use to provide great web user interfaces.

Great work, Aytekin!

Here are the new features:

• Added auto-scroll option to Draggables and Sortables, activate with scroll: ‘id_of_scroll_container_element’. See test/functional/dragdrop3_test.html for usage/demo
• Add limit option to effect queues to limit the maximum number of effects in a queue, new unit tests for scoped effect queues, fixes #3498 [thx Abdur-Rahman Advany]
• Add Sortable.sequence method to extract the current sequence of a Sortable as an array, fixes #3675 [thx sphivo]
• Added activate method to Autocompleter that allows you to trigger the suggestions through other means than user input [DHH]
• Add assertEnumEqual for unit testing (from Prototype SVN trunk) [Sam Stephenson]

Additionally, various bugs where fixed (see the CHANGELOG for details).

Get it at the script.aculo.us downloads page.

(So I’m back from exploring London now, hope to get some more updates to script.aculo.us done over the next few weeks!)

Abdur-Rahman Advany explains all about the visual effects queues of script.aculo.us and what sort of things you can achieve with them.

The short story is: You can create complete timelines of effects, with more than one scope (that’s what we call a “track” in script.aculo.us). This allows to do some neat trickery, like queuing effects up until other effects are finished, or limiting the number of effects that can occur in a scope (for example to prevent users from hitting a button 10 times because the effect looks so nice and breaking things by doing so).

So, if you’re using visual effects and want to have more control over them read the article.

(There are other articles coming up on Abdur-Rahman’s site on even more aspects of the script.aculo.us visual effects, please keep it up!)

The lastest episode of the Audbile Ajax Podcast is all about script.aculo.us, web usability and other subjects:

Some of the first “wow” moments were due to the effects created by Thomas Fuchs in his Script.aculo.us library that builds on top of Prototype. Many people didn’t realise that with one line of JavaScript code they could get such a nice effect to happen, and now ugly developer-created sites have a chance ;)

We had the pleasure of interviewing Thomas, an we got to discuss his frameworks, and gain knowledge from his experience.

What you will learn in this podcast

• How script.acuo.us was born out of a real project
• Why Rails was chosen for Fluxiom
• Where Rails shines with Ajax
• The new RJS templates feature that makes Ajax even easier
• The difference between Prototype and Script.aculo.us
• How Script.aculo.us is available in Rails 1.0
• Future plans for Script.aculo.us
• When you should use the cool effects, and when you should not
• About drag and drop and web usability
• Challenges that Thomas has faced with his Ajax projects
• Why you would choose an Ajax application versus using other technologies such as Flash
• How hard it is to build a very rich Ajax application
• How to handle browser differences
• Experiences with DOM manipulation and innerHTML
• How naming collisions are not as much of an issue in recent builds of Prototype

So, tune right in!