Taconite Implementations
There are two implementations of Taconite: Classic and Taconite jQuery Plugin.
Taconite Classic is self contained and has no external dependencies. Taconite Classic is made up of two pars:
- The client (in taconite-client.js) that provides an abstraction to creating and sending Ajax request and the parser (in taconite-parser.js). The Taconite client provides an abstraction over creating XMLHttpRequest objects and populating with data to be sent to the server.
- The parser (in taconite-parser.js) that is responsible for parsing the server's XML response and updating the DOM. The parser can be used independently of the client. The parser is implemented using standard DOM manipulation methods, with several tweaks to make it cross-browser compatible (mostly hacks to get around Internet Explorer's limitations).
The Taconite jQuery Plugin has an external dependency on jQuery. The plugin provides client functionality similar to jQuery's $.get, $.post, and $.ajax methods. In addition, the parser uses jQuery's high-quality DOM manipulation methods to do the "heavy lifting" of updating the DOM according to the server's XML response. Note that the formats of the response XML is slightly different for the Taconite jQuery plugin that for Taconite Classic.
Which Implementation is Right for Me?
It's mostly a matter of preference. If you already use jQuery, you can add Taconite's functionality by adding only a 3 kb file. In addition, the Taconite jQuery plugin has some other advantages over Taconite Classic.
If you're currenly a user of Taconite Classic there's no need to move to the jQuery plugin unless you have a specific reason to do so.