JavaScript Tools

To Read: High Performance JavaScript

jQuery Plugins

http://www.awkwardgroup.com/sandbox/awkward-showcase-a-jquery-plugin/

Very cool show case, slides can be interactive.

http://jamielottering.github.com/DropKick/

Cleaner drop-downs

http://anthonyterrien.com/knob/

Knob style controls

http://www.designchemical.com/lab/jquery-drill-down-menu-plugin/examples/

Drill down. Lets the user move up and down through a tree

http://duopixel.com/extremes/

Simple, just places links in a circle

http://zikes.github.com/circle-menu/examples/

Circular menus - I really like the nested in a corner example, that could be really cool.

http://prinzhorn.github.com/skrollr/

This is just cool - I'm not sure how easy it would be to work with, but it could be really good.

http://masonry.desandro.com/

http://yconst.com/web/freetile/

This could help with some of my CSS frustration

http://gridster.net/

Draggable grid

http://www.jqplot.com/

Every type of graph EVAR

http://bartaz.github.com/impress.js/#/bored

Slides in javascript

Development Tools

jsFiddle

Frameworks

In working on my Tasks program, I began to realize how badly I needed a framework. I initially tried to handle the organization myself with a Core and a UI connected by listeners, but I couldn't get anything I was really happy with and even the decent attempts would not have scaled well.

Backbone

Library of utilities not a framework. Meh, looks very MVCish, not the dynamic environment I want. The collections look pretty good though. I watched most of video and I had no idea what was Backbone and what was just the presenters personal preference.

Knockout

MVVM, sounds pretty good. Microsoft pushing it so hard makes me wary.

Spine

Lightweight.

Sammy

Also light, basic structure

Mustache

Basic: use double curly braces to access an object. Double will auto-escape data and triple will not.

The call is actually made with

 Mustache.to_html(template, data);

Blocks: Starts with # ends with /

 {{#foo}}
   ...
 {{/foo}}

If foo is boolean, it will act as an if. If foo is a list, it will iterate over the list and the list item can be accessed with {{.}}.

Templates are simply strings. Often they are included as scripts with the type set to something like "text/template" or "test/mustache".