[jQuery] OT: fQuery
[jQuery] OT: fQuery
Hi gang, (semi off-topic..)
I just released a rather cool bit of PHP code inspired by jQuery.
In Drupal (drupal.org, CMS), our form structures (which govern user
interaction) are built up as big trees of objects (group boxes,
textfields, checkboxes, buttons, etc.). These arrays are a powerful
tool to work with, as it becomes easy to insert new features in the
middle of a form, for example to add 3rd party modules to the mix.
They also help separate structure from user content.
Unfortunately, large tree structures can be cumbersome to use because
you need to iterate over elements all the time. Sound familiar? Just
like jQuery makes the clunky DOM elegant, my tool, fQuery, allows you
to do use a CSS-like syntax to query the big arrays. It works like a
charm and makes writing certain kinds of code much easier.
So, if you want all fieldsets on a page that are collapsible, you use
"fieldset.collapsible". Finding textfields inside fieldsets becomes
"fieldset > textfield". Checkboxes with a keyword matching in their
label? "checkbox[#title*=keyword]".
Implementing a jQuery like query system has opened up a whole new way
of dealing with forms in Drupal. It's a really cool technique. The
best part is that it's relatively easy to adapt the code to custom
structures, as the parsing is separate from the operators. It's easy
to insert your own tree structure and define custom operators (e.g.
filesystem queries where you use pathnames + filename meta data).
Has anyone else tried something like this? The jQuery architecture is
definitely useful beyond DOM. I'm thinking if a bunch of people get
together, we could make such custom "xQuery" systems easy to develop
and use. I guess XPath is something similar, but I honestly don't
know how much it's used ;).
Steven Wittens
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