FOSDEM '10 is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. No registration necessary.

   

Interview: Christoph Pojer

Christoph Pojer will give a talk about MooTools at FOSDEM 2010.

Could you briefly introduce yourself? And how are you involved with MooTools?

I'm 21 years old, located in Graz (Austria) and I'm currently studying Software Engineering and Business Administration. I started using moo.fx and then I moved on to MooTools when it was first released. I made some small contributions and after some time I became an active member in the Core Development team.

What will your talk be about, exactly?

I will present the various MooTools projects and how they help with application development both in terms of code and infrastructure.

What do you hope to accomplish by giving this talk? What do you expect?

I will explain the core principles of MooTools and I will show the exciting stuff that we are working on. I expect to raise awareness of the future impact of JavaScript outside of the browser.

What's the history of the MooTools project? How did it evolve?

The MooTools project is completely independent and was created by Valerio Proietti in 2006. I would however say that the most important year for MooTools so far was 2009. We kind of got together as a development team, we restructured the whole project completely, launched several sub-projects and organized the first two MooTools-"Hackathons" in the US and in Europe.

How does MooTools compare with other JavaScript frameworks? What is its unique selling point?

The most important aspect about MooTools Core is certainly the clean, concise API that tries to feel natural when developing JavaScript. It extends the language and it brings a class-oriented concept, known from classical object oriented languages, to make it easier to apply well-known design patterns. In addition to that the modular, layered structure greatly benefits the project. For example our DOM-abstraction is built on the aforementioned functionality, which in return is the base for more high level functionality such as Fx or Request.

Why was MooTools split into MooTools Core and MooTools More last year? And what are the rules to decide in which part a component resides? What's the fundamental difference between the two?

Early in 2009 we found that MooTools kept growing and growing and it started to become increasingly hard to maintain as a single repository. We decided to split up the low-level APIs and the high-level Plugins into separate official projects. MooTools Core should provide the base functionality such as Class, Element and Fx, while MooTools More is even more modular. More currently provides more than 50 ready-to-use plugins that build on Core and extend its functionality.

How big is the developer community of MooTools?

Because of the before mentioned change in structure, it is hard to say at the moment. We now focus much more on individual projects under the MooTools name. Officially we are about 15 developers but we have a lot of contributors split up in each of these sub-projects. There are currently about 50 people actively taking part in our internal discussions.

What new functionality will we see in MooTools this year?

A lot! I suppose you will have to attend my talk to find out ;)

Have you enjoyed previous FOSDEM editions?

This is the first time I'm attending FOSDEM and the first time I'm visiting Belgium. Je me réjouis de visiter Bruxelles mais je ne parle pas très bien le français.

Creative Commons License
This interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.