I have been asked several times what really makes this different than toolkits like jQuery. And what is the compelling reason that someone would use Protoscript.
The motivation is straightforward:
- Prototyping is too hard for non-techies
- Simplifying how we express interactions is a good thing
- Behavior injection is a powerful iterative design tool
- Plug-in Behaviors guarantee a growing set of prototyping solutions
- By focusing on prototyping, things get simpler
The end goal of Protoscript is a simple GUI that will allow non-techies to:
- Go to any web page
- Sprinkle simple to complex interactions onto that page
- Do all this without writing code, but simply through an intuitive interface
I have been fortunate to work with some awesome talent, many of which do not have the skills, the time or patience to prototype in Javascript.
Do I want to exclude them from the party? No.
If I can let more team members literally play with a working site and tease out better interactions then I have raised the state of the art (even if ever so slightly).
Simplifying how we express interactions is a good thing
By allowing an interaction to be expressed in a consistent, stylized declarative fashion (JSON) a whole set of goodness becomes available:
- Widely variant interactions captured with same simple syntax
- Nested syntax communicates the relationship between behaviors, events, callbacks & attributes
- Non-programmers can read Protoscript better than JavaScript code. jQuery comes the closest to making Javascript readable by non-programmers (see discussion below on Protoscript and jQuery).
- It is a lot easier to write a GUI tool that reads and writes JSON than it is to read/write Javascript. (This is why so many tools use XML or JSON since they are declarative formats)
- JSON can be sent over the wire. This means a simple REST service could serve up and/or save JSON to remote services.
- JSON is easier to parse
- JSON is easy to write out to a database or as a flat file
The Protoscripter bookmarklet is the first step in providing behavior injection. It allows you to popup the bookmarklet on any web page and type or paste in Protoscript code to inject interactions. (You can get it from the Protoscript Home page.)
Here is a fun example of this... Watch as I experiment with burritophile.org (mind you this is a contrived example)