I think the thing I enjoy most about computers is learning new things; finding new, better and/or more efficient ways of performing a task.  In order to do this, I will often look for new ideas to implement when beginning even a boring mundane project to make it more challenging and to ensure I come out of the other end having learnt something new.

With one (Of the many) projects I'm working on at the moment I've decided to use it as a chance to learn the jQuery JavaScript library, which seems pretty neat so far.  One of the dependancies of this project is sifnt Modal which of course was written with the Prototype library in mind, so a port of that was needed before I could even start!

For whatever reason, when I first delved into JavaScript and AJAX a few years ago I picked Prototype as my helper library.

Since then I've written a lot of code requiring Prototype, so even though the idea of switching to something like jQuery has been tempting, the fact that I would either have to rewrite a whole bunch of code or include TWO 100kB+ JavaScript libraries has kept me away.

One of my main on-going projects required a resizable text area, and I knew that Drupal (This blog is a Drupal site) had just the right thing for it.  The problem is that Drupal's TextAreaResizer script is written for jQuery and it seemed rather stupid to include the whole of jQuery just to put a 'grippie' on the bottom of a textarea.  No other Prototype ports of this exist (At least that I could find) so I decided to give doing it myself a go.

Prototype Port of textarearesizer.js

Features:

• Simple, neat and unobtrusive textarea and iframe resizing
• Written for use with Prototype
• Tested in Firefox 3.0.3 and Internet Explorer 7
• Ability to specify a callback function after you have finished dragging

Links:

• Download (Snapshot of Subversion Revision 70)
• Subversion Repository (Recommended)
  
• Demo
• Original jQuery TextAreaResizer Plugin

Updates:

• Chrome fix: Thanks to Scott Falkingham