Matt Knight

I’ve always wondered how something can be “new” and “improved”. To be improved suggests that there was something there previously, and hence it can’t be new.

However, I think I’ve now found how something can fulfill both these criteria, and this blog is my prime example of this.

There was a blog here. I use the past tense because I didn’t really maintain it much – or at all in fact! That blog was based on Habari which I chose over WordPress at the time. I’ve now changed to WordPress. Read the remainder of this entry »

Well, I might as well kick off this debate. It”s not exactly a new one, but I like to think it is a changing one.

I”ve used Windows since Windows 3.1, and have used pretty much every version up to Windows 7 at some point since then. It was never that I had any particular love of Windows, it was always just the default choice.

Years ago I had an old machine running FreeBSD, and then in about 2004 I moved to Linux more seriously. Since then, I”ve tried a whole host of different Linux flavours – Mandrake/Mandriva, Fedora Core, Debian and Ubuntu being the most notable. I”ve also used some of the mini-distributions such as Knoppix and Puppy Linux in emergencies! Read the remainder of this entry »

When building a framework, it”s critical to get the structure correct from the outset, else it”ll just make things far more complicated in future. As I”m familiar with the Zend Framework, and it seems to have a fairly logical structure, I based the JS framework structure around this. Read the remainder of this entry »

In the past, I”ve used jQuery. I like the way it works with plugins, and its syntax seemed fairly sensible. But I started working with MooTools last year, and I really like it.

The task that I was commissioned with was to build a front-end application framework that would allow a user to interact with RESTful services. It was to be written entirely in JavaScript, and had to be incredibly flexible. We narrowed down the choice of JavaScript framework to MooTools, jQuery and Dojo. For a variety of reasons, MooTools was our final choice.

It was pretty evident, however, that we were going to have to dramatically extend MooTools with our own code library, in order to turn it into what would effectively become an object-oriented, MVC framework.

In this blog, I hope to share some of the lessons we learnt along the way. We found bugs (or at least, what we considered to be poor behaviour) in MooTools and Firefox, as well as obvious problems in IE 6, 7 and 8. Read the remainder of this entry »