Ajax Girl

There are a lot of lightboxes out there. Most use specific libraries such as jQuery, Prototype or MooTools but few, if any, are completely library agnostic. This poses a challenge when you want to incorporate, say, a really cool lightbox from MooTools into a Prototype application.

Michael J. I. Jackson (no relation to the singer) wanted to address that and I think he’s done a stellar job with his newly released Shadowbox LightBox component:

A few weeks ago, I was looking for a Lightbox-like script that would allow me to display more than just pictures. In addition to static images, my client required the ability to display various types of movies including QuickTime and SWF. The only script that fit the bill was Lightwindow—a nice piece of work to be sure—but it required the Prototype + Scriptaculous combo and I was already using YUI.

Besides, I thought, it would be really great to have a full-featured media viewing application that was library agnostic. Then, if I need to use a different framework for some particular reason, I can easily switch.

Thus was born Shadowbox—a cross-browser, cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application built entirely in JavaScript. It’s currently in beta testing phase, so please let me know on this post if you find any bugs or have problems with it.

The approach of making ShadowBox library agnostic and using an adapter architecture for plugging in different frameworks should really help to generate some buzz and acceptance of this plugin. Apart from that, the breadth of features and the smooth functionality make it very enticing.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/223013663/library-agnostic-lightbox