README

# Titanium Alloy

Alloy is a small javascript library that naturally developed during the development of a 
number of Titanium Mobile apps. For the most part, the library consists of shortcuts and 
convenience methods for existing Titanium functionality, however, Alloy does have some 
potentially useful additions.

**Please note that this code is not documented, optimized, or really even tested much beyond 
the needs of my own personal apps. I would not recommend relying too heavily on this in its 
current state**


## Code jQuery Style

Alloy is written and compiled jquery style, just without the DOM functionality. I know what 
you're thinking, "WTH is the point of that?", right. This was simply to keep things familiar 
and easily remembered. With the 0.9 - 1.0 release of Titanium, there were a surprising number 
of folks who seem to get lost when jquery is not available. However, without a DOM present, 
there are obviously going to be some differences. Most importantly:

1. Alloy object is not returned as an array of elements, but rather an object with a possible 
context. As selectors, in their native form, don't do us much good, querying for a list of elements 
becomes a completely different animal. It may be possible to track the UI in such a way, but 
I'll leave that for some future headache.

2. Creating a UI element via alloy currently returns the Titanium UI object rather than an 
alloy object wrapped around the element. This just made working with UI objects a bit 
easier for now, however it does impact the chaining functionality.

Regardless, using alloy functionality on a Titanium object remains quite simple. ie:
	   
	// bind a TableView created by normal process
	var tableView = Ti.UI.createTableView({data:data});
	$(tableView).bind('click', function(e) {
		// click event handler
	});
	
	// bind some custom-ness to Ti.App
	$(Ti.App).bind('my_event', function(e) {
		// custom handler
	});
	
## Plugins
	   		
Although DOM functionality is not available, the plugin extensibility is. Plugins are created syntactically 
identical to jquery plugins, with the exception of the return object. Since alloy is not an array of elements, 
the usual `return this.each(function() { //code })` is not necessary. Simply return the alloy object after the 
plugin code has been executed. The activityIndicator and the messageWindow plugins come baked into alloy. 
See the plugin code for a better look at the differences and similarities.

## Themes / Styles

One useful feature I added is the ability to setup style definitions for UI objects that can be used as 'themes'. 
By simply creating default and className like object configurations for elements, I cut down on much of my repetative 
code and made it easy to keep my UI uniform across windows, views, and apps. These 'themes' are extremely easy to 
create:

	// example theme definition in themes/default.js
	$.theme({
		label: {
			height:'auto',
			width:'auto',
			top:5,
			left:5,
			right:5,
			bottom:5,
			font:{fontSize:14,fontWeight:'normal'},
			color:'#666',
			shadowColor:'#fff',
			shadowOffset:{x:0,y:1}
		},
		"headerLabel": {
			width:300,
			height:'auto',
			color:'#D2242A',
			font:{
				fontSize:20,
				fontFamily:'Helvetica',
				fontWeight:'bold'
			},
			shadowColor:'#000',
			shadowOffset:{x:0,y:1},
			textAlign:'left'
		}
	});

The above theme sets the default style for all alloy created `label` elements as well as a separate label 
definition for elements marked with the `headerLabel` 'class'. To use a theme definition just pass the config 
to the `$.theme()` method before creating UI elements.

	// Set theme definition by importing theme file.
	// I keep my themes in a seperate file for easy switching
	Ti.include('themes/default.js');
	
	// Create a label with the default style.
	$.label({text:'This is a default label'});
	
	// Create a label with headerLabel style.
	$.label({text:'This is a header label'}, "headerLabel");
	
	// Alter any style definition on the fly.
	$.label({text:'Altered header label',color:'#ff0000'}, "headerLabel");
	
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## Try It Out

Want to just plug alloy in and give it a try quick? All you need is the alloy.js or alloy.min.js file. You can 
get just the necessary files in a tarball from the Downloads tab. Everything is compiled in save for the test 
theme which you can find in the themes/ dir. Once you have the js, just include it like normal.

	Ti.include('titanium_alloy/alloy.js');
	
## Docs & Other Stuff

If alloy is possibly useful to others, then I'll put together some decent documentation, otherwise the 
project will continue to change based on my needs and more than likely remain less than minimally documented.

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Copyright ©2010 by Anthony Decena
Mindelusions, Inc.
http://mindelusions.com