We've Improved Our JavaScript API–jQuery Users Rejoice!

WARNING: nerd speak in full effect. If you don’t write JavaScript, this announcement probably isn’t nearly as cool for you.

For years Big Cartel has offered a slick and powerful JavaScript API that allows web designers and developers to add fancy-pants Ajax to their store. With a little clever coding, you can do some extremely creative things with your products and cart.

However, until now our API was reliant on the Prototype library. This made perfect sense at the time, as we were able to leverage Prototype’s great Ajax support, and our default themes were also built using Prototype. Since then jQuery has come onto the scene and won over the hearts of coders everywhere (including ours), and getting our API to work with jQuery was a bit of a chore.

Today we’re happy to announce that Big Cartel’s JavaScript API is 100% standalone and requires no other libraries. This means it works perfectly with jQuery, Prototype, MooTools, Dojo, YUI, or any other flavor of JavaScript you can throw at it. We’ve also got the size of our API down to a teeny 3.8KB, and improved the speed of our Ajax calls.

We’ve updated our JavaScript API documentation and put together a little jQuery example to get you started. We can’t wait to see what you guys can do with this new speed and flexibility.