Yet Some More Excellent JavaScript Libraries And Tools

These are some Javascript libraries, frameworks and tools that can be used to create stunning web applications. We showcase 3 new frameworks and some tools that you might not be aware of.

ZK Direct RIA

ZK is the leading open source Ajax + Mobile framework. With over 1,000,000 downloads, ZK empowers a variety of companies and institutions, ranging from small to large, including Barclays, Sun Microsystems, Swiss RE, Alcatel-Lucent, and many others. ZK has created and released as open source some great and state of the art projects. Some of them are: ZK Studio ZK Studio is a visual integrated development environment providing intuitive tools that span the entire application development lifecycle. Tools are included for UI design, prototyping, development, and deployment when implementing ZK applications The ZK Framework ZK is the most proven Ajax + Mobile framework designed to maximize enterprise operation efficiency and minimize the development cost by its groundbreaking Direct RIA architecture. ZK Spreadsheet ZK Spreadsheet enables Ajax applications to deliver the rich functionality of Excel® within browsers using pure Java. With embeddable Excel® functionality, developers are able to create collaborative and dynamic enterprise applications at minimal cost. Java is all you need to know in order to develop Ajax-enabled web applications with ZK. The most interesting project is the ZK framework and you can find a great demo here. A great tutorial explaining how to build a real world application with database access, will help you get started.

APE

APE is an open source technology allowing to exchange data between thousands of users through a web browser, without reloading. Ape is a new library that allows multiple users to exchange data in real time. It is something similar to RED5 and Adobe's Flash server. To set up the enviroment you need to have fundamental knowledge of AJAX, JavaScript and server administration since it requires specific server settings. Written with the use of the MooTools Library, the APE JavaScript Framework receives information sent by the server, handles the data, and sends back the users requests.

vegUI

vegUI was originally developed to serve as a foundation for the online browser-based mmorpg Lands of Kazram. vegUI uses a template system, that allows you to define any vegUI element/widget as a template. Templates can then be used to clone as many duplicates as you want. This saves time and space while writing the code and also speeds up the loading process of the scripts. vegUI is also able to load and build modules at "runtime", so instead of loading in everything at once - which would result in some longer waiting times on big applications - vegUI can load and build modules as they are needed even after the page has already been loaded. vegUI comes with several widgets that should allow you to build a fairly solid web-application. However due to its modular design additional widgets can be added without much of a hassle. These are the predefined widgets that come with the vegUI package:

• Button
• Checkbox
• Selector
• List
• Contentbox
• Scrollbar
• Tabbed Dialog
• Property Set
• Window
• Dropdown Menu

XML.ObjTree XML Parser

The XML.ObjTree class is a parser/generater for XML source code and JavaScript object. This is a JavaScript version of XML::TreePP for Perl. This also works as a wrapper for XMLHTTPRequest and successor to JKL.ParseXML class when using with prototype.js or JSAN's HTTP.Request class. In other words, you can parse an XML document and create a JavaScript object from it. A demo conversion can be found here.

JS Validate

This is a forms validator class that utilizes aspects of prototype and scriptaculous to bring you a simple to execute, non-intrusive javascript form validator. To setup the validator you pass some parameters in any form element that needs to be validated. For example if you want to create a required field, you should add the jsrequired class to the element: [code lang="html"]<input type="text" name="search" class="jsrequired"/><br />  <input type="submit" value="go" />[/code] The above example would produce an error if the user submits the form without filling the search field. You can use these parameters:

• jsrequired - Field must have some sort of value.
• jsvalidate_number - Any integer; accepts decimal and negative
• jsvalidate_digits - Only Numbers
• jsvalidate_alpha - Only letters
• jsvalidate_alphanum - Only letters, numbers, and underscores.
• jsvalidate_email - Any valid email address.
• jsvalidate_uscanzip - US or Canada Zip code; Accepts optional US zip + 4
• jsvalidate_usstate - Any 2 letter uppercase state of the United States.
• jsvalidate_usphone - US Phone Number, accepts most common formats.
• jsvalidate_creditcard - Validates VISA, MasterCard, American Express; formats: no spaces, spaces, or dashes.
• jsvalidate_ssn - Social Security Number in the format: XXXXXXXXX, XXX XX XXXX, or XXX-XX-XXXXX
• select-notfirst - This class can be applied to select boxes (drop-downs). It prohibits the user from selecting the first option from the list.

Livepipe Tabs

Control.Tabs attaches creates a tabbed interface from an unordered list of links/anchors that point to any elements on your page that have an id attribute. Since it attaches these behaviors to HTML that already has semantic meaning, it will degrade gracefully for browsers that do not support JavaScript, and is search engine friendly. It attaches in one line of code for simple use cases, but is highly customizable and can be used in a variety of edge cases.

AutoSuggest

The AutoSuggest class adds a popdown menu of suggested values to a text field. The user can either click directly on a suggestion to enter it into the field, or navigate the list using the up and down arrow keys, selecting a value using the tab key. The values for the suggestion list are to provided as XML (by a PHP script, or similar).

Sortable Tables

You can create sortable unobtrusive tables with this library. You can create sortable columns with a specific sorting algorithm for specific columns, alternate rows colors and even paginate table data.

Cookie Jar

JavaScript code to store data as JSON strings in cookies. It uses prototype.js to store and retrieve JSON data from cookies.