Last week, we tagged the first stable release of 1.7, marking the end of a far-too-long release cycle. We've made more than 50 improvements since the last stable version and are already working on 1.7.0.1.

What's new?

To learn about new features in version 1.7, refer to the blog post about the 1.7 RC1 release.

As always, this release includes an assortment of bug fixes. Consult the CHANGELOG for further details, or see the full diff between this release and RC3.

What's next?

As I said when we released RC3, I'm eager to resume work on script.aculo.us 2.0, which had its first beta release two months ago. But we've also got plenty planned for the next few versions of Prototype:

The next bugfix version (1.7.0.1) will feature a rewrite of the DOM code to be easier to read and faster at the same time. We'll be consulting the TaskSpeed benchmarks throughout to measure our progress toward speeding up common DOM tasks.

(1.7.0.1) will feature a rewrite of the DOM code to be easier to read and faster at the same time. We'll be consulting the TaskSpeed benchmarks throughout to measure our progress toward speeding up common DOM tasks. The next minor release (1.7.1) will feature better compatibility with ECMAScript5 for all the stuff we share: Function#bind , Array#map , and so on. We'll make sure these methods are up to spec so that we can implement them as proper polyfills when they don't exist in the browser — and use the native versions where they do exist.

(1.7.1) will feature better compatibility with ECMAScript5 for all the stuff we share: , , and so on. We'll make sure these methods are up to spec so that we can implement them as proper polyfills when they don't exist in the browser — and use the native versions where they do exist. The next major release (1.8) will feature an overhaul of the Ajax code. We'll add a bunch of new features: JSONP, timeouts, guaranteed firing of callbacks for non-guaranteed readyStates, and a lot more.

In addition, there are exciting things in the future for Evidence (the eventual replacement for our unit testing library) and Sprockets (our JavaScript concatenator and dependency manager).

Download, report bugs, and get help

Thanks to the many contributors who made this release possible!