Rico is a Spanish word meaning rich. The goal of Rico is to provide a rich experience for web sites using Ajax technology. Rico is just one small part of a larger effort at Sabre Airline Solutions to create a suite of rich internet components, behaviors and effects for the web application space. The library is a fully object-oriented JavaScript library. Recently we refactored the library to extend the excellent prototype.js effort from the Ruby on Rails folks. features: AJAX SUPPORT Ajax is the term that describes a set of web development techniques for creating interactive web applications. One of the key ingredients is the JavaScript object XmlHttpRequest. 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. 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. CINEMATIC EFFECTS When actions are no longer occurring just at the page level but within the page itself, more clues are required to clue the user on what has transpired. Cinematic effects such as scaling and smooth sliding transitions can communicate change in richer ways than traditional web applications have explored before. Rico provides several cinematic effects as well as some simple visual style effects in a very simple interface. BEHAVIORS Take some raw HTML and sprinkle in some behaviors and what do you get? Well in Rico you can get an Accordion component like those found in Macromedia Flex and Laszlo. Just nest some DIVs and with one line of JavaScript turn your div panels into an accordion. More behaviors are planned!
