In the last few days I got the time to read some magazines I neglected for the last 1-2 weeks. While I read them, I found some very interesting JS libraries:
Bevel-JS
Link: http://www.netzgesta.de/bevel/
A cool script, which enables you to modify images via javascript.
In the foreground, you can see the image which can be found in the example directory of the library, while in the background there're the modified images with applied image filters. Both included JS files only have an altogether size of 48kb.
Flot-JS
Link: http://code.google.com/p/flot/
The following code is from the example directory:
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$(function () {
var d1 = [];
for (var i = 0; i < 14; i += 0.5)
d1.push([i, Math.sin(i)]);
var d2 = [[0, 3], [4, 8], [8, 5], [9, 13]];
// a null signifies separate line segments
var d3 = [[0, 12], [7, 12], null, [7, 2.5], [12, 2.5]];
$.plot($("#placeholder"), [ d1, d2, d3 ]);
});
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What looks a little bit mathematical is just the description of several graphs, which look as following:
This is just a simple version of what the flot-library offers. Another slightly more complex version, which consists of several different graph types can also be found in the example dir:
To say it with the words of a colleague of mine: "I won't need that more than once a year - but then it could be realy useful."
One nice thing about these diagrams is: The library offers methods to retrieve the values at the current cursor position and also a way to zoom the displayed diagram.
Ext-JS
Link: http://extjs.com
The ExtJS seems to offer some very nice controls. A screenshot of the API-Documentation of the frameworks demonstrates some of the controls, which are also used on their own page:
As you can see in the tree on the left-hand side, there're some very useful controls, which can be found in almost all applications. E.g.: Grid, Menu, Tree.
For the lazy guys: There're also some video tutorials available on the page ;-)
zXml
Link: http://nczonline.net/downloads/
If you click on the link above, you'll be redirected to a page, where you can find many nice JS-libraries. E.g. one extension extends the JS-arrays with the method "clone".
But the class I've been interested in most, offers an browser independent interface to handle XML. The JS file is only 14kb in size and offers to write code like the following:
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//create a DOM document
var oXml = zXmlDom.createDocument();
//fill it with some XML
oXml.loadXML("<root><child index=\"1\"/><child index=\"2\"/> <child index=\"1\"/><child index=\"3\"/></root>");
//look around
alert("Root is: " + oXml.documentElement.tagName);
alert("First child is: " + oXml.documentElement.firstChild.tagName);
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As you can see, you're able to use the usual terms like firstChild or tagName to work with the various elements and their values.
Dojo-Offline-Toolkit
Link: http://dojotoolkit.org/offline
The "entwickler"-magazine (edition: march/april) wrote an article about the usage of the dojo-offline-toolkit in cooperation with Google-Gears. Google-Gears offers a SQLite database and a proxy server to store dynamic content on the client to display it controlled when it's needed.
The dojo-offline toolkit doesn't add new functionality to Google-Gears, but offers some methods to ease the work with Gears. Some of the methods are the "Dojo-Storage" which can persist objects, methods to execute sql and some to download resources from the given page (called 'slurp').
Only for the completeness of this page are here some further links to frameworks I know:
- Prototype
- Script.Aculo.Us
- Moo-Ajax und Moo-FX
- JQuery
- ASP.Net Ajax
All of these are great frameworks which don't only focus on ajax but also add perfect effects for your page. However I assume that these frameworks are much more common and don't need any explanation here.