Chris Cruft <c...@hapgoods.com>

I've recently been foiled by the pluginification of InPlaceEditor and
AutoCompleter in RoR and their incompatibilities with the current
Scriptaculous and Prototype.  In the past, being very comfortable in
Ruby,  I would have simply monkey patched the in_place_editor (for
example) to pass the htmlResponse variable.  But after doing some
research, I'm convinced that the Rails helpers are evil: I buy into
the behavior/content/style separation argument and I'm convinced that
the differing dev cycles on the three projects means the helpers will
forever be out of sync.

What's a developer to do?  I looked at jQuery, but I'm not ready to
ditch Prototype and Scriptaculous.  Then I found LowPro.  And while I
really don't like the idea of yet another library, I would consider a
small one if it is slick.

My first stab a LowPro involved removing the Rails JS helper
in_place_editor and adding code to application.js to add this behavior
to the relevant elements.  But WHERE is the InPlaceEditor behavior?
This behavior file in the lowpro subversion repository is only a
skeleton.  And the AutoCompleter is totally empty!  What gives?  Am I
expected to stitch Scriptaculous' AutoCompleter into LowPro myself?
If so, can anyone point me to an example?

-Chris