MooTools (My Object-Oriented Tools) is a lightweight, object-oriented JavaScript framework. It is released under the free, open-source MIT License.

Overview

MooTools provides the user with a number of options beyond native JavaScript. These include: The framework includes built-in functions for manipulation of CSS, DOM elements, native JavaScript objects, Ajax requests, DOM effects, and more. MooTools also provides a detailed, coherent application programming interface (API), as well as a custom downloads module allowing developers to download only the modules and dependencies they need for a particular app.

History

Valerio Proietti first authored the framework and released it in September 2006 taking as his inspiration Prototype and Dean Edward's base2. MooTools originated from Moo.fx, a popular JavaScript effects library released in October 2005 by Valerio Proietti as an add-on to the Prototype Javascript Framework. It can be used as a lighter alternative to script.aculo.us or other, bigger libraries. It provides simple, basic effects, and guarantees a small library size. Whereas Prototype extended—prototyped—many of JavaScript's native String, Array, and Function objects with additional methods, Proietti desired a framework that (at the time) further extended the native Element object as well to offer greater control of the Document Object Model (DOM).

Components

MooTools includes a number of components, but not all need to be loaded for each application. Some of the component categories are:

Browser compatibility

MooTools is compatible and tested with:

Emphasis on modularity and reusability

Every JavaScript framework has its philosophy, and MooTools is interested in taking full advantage of the flexibility and power of JavaScript in a way that emphasizes greater modularity and code reuse. MooTools accomplishes these goals intuitively to a developer coming from a class-based inheritance language like Java with the MooTools Class object. Class is an object of key/value pairs containing either properties or methods (functions). Class is effortlessly mixed and extended with other Class instantiations allowing for the most excellent focus of MooTools: Code reuse achieved through maximizing the power of JavaScript's prototypical inheritance but in a Class object syntax more familiar to classical inheritance models.

Object-oriented programming

MooTools contains a robust Class creation and inheritance system that resembles most classically based Object-oriented programming languages. For example, the following is MooTools' equivalent of the examples in Wikipedia's polymorphism page: