Ajax.Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater has a decay option

Prototype JavaScript framework: Ajax.Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater

There's plenty of treasure in API docs, I've usually found--like when you need two submit buttons for an AJAX form. While tutorials are helpful for just getting started, I'm a firm believer in just browsing through API docs and references once in a while, like a lazy grounds keeper checking for garden gnomes. I also like reading dictionaries. I don't do that too often, just when I'm looking up words. I never got any papers done until internet dictionaries came around.

The past two days, I've been playing more with Javascript, and that involved looking more closely at the Prototype library that comes with Rails. So far, my experience with prototype has been pretty good. It's less high level than, say mookit, but I think it was meant to fill holes in the current javascript language. Even little things like Try.these() are nice, due to javascript discrepancies between browsers.

As a result of browsing through the Prototype API, I found that the adaptive polling I had talked about before was actually already in the Prototype library. It was just never mentioned in any of the Rails docs or tutorials about periodically_call_remote().

Though I don't know if it was around when I blogged it last December, that should be lesson to me to stop talking, and just try writing a patch, as Prototype is open source. I probably would have learned a lot.