TufteGraph is a JQuery Plugin that generates beautiful (stacked) bar charts. It works in conjunction with the JQuery enumerable plugin. The graphs can be styled via CSS. If you are looking for beautiful colors you want to use on the charts, you can find some at colourlovers.com.

Why is it different from other JavaScript charting libraries?

• Uses dynamic functions for configuration, allowing for a really compact API (very few options)
• Non-core layout is done via CSS rather than code

JQuery Multi Level Popup Menu enhances arbitrary links on your page with multi level powers. Using this script, you can associate a multi level drop down menu to any link on the page. Moving the mouse over the link activates the menu to be shown beside it. The menus are SEO friendly, each one being defined as a nested <ul> on the page.

To remain in view, the sub-menus reposition themselves when too close to the right or bottom edges of the browser window. The expand animation speed can be customized, as well as the delay before each menu and it’s sub-menus appear / disappear when the mouse rolls on and out of them.

UKI, a fast and simple UI KIT for desktop-like web applications, comes with a rich view-component library ranging from Slider to List and SplitPane. By using progressive rendering, this JavaScript user interface toolkit can render 30k+ lists and (complex client side searchable) tables most instantly.

UKI is very simple to setup. You do not need builders to install, no dependencies to manage and no CSS to include. All you have to do is add the <script> tag to your HTML.

While uki can occupy the whole browser window it feels perfectly OK in a small <div> in your sidebar. Just use .attachTo( myDiv ) for any widget you want to add.

There is no AJAX or data storage layer code in UKI. It only does layout, but it does it well.

Packt Publishing sent me a copy of PHP and script.aculo.us Web 2.0 Application Interfaces by Sridhar Rao, asking me to write a review of this book. I was quite excited about this opportunity, being the first time when a modern publishing company is asking my opinion regarding one of the books from their collection.

As both the title and the subtitle suggest, this book is meant for PHP and AJAX developers. Since there are quite some readers of this blog that use these technologies in their web applications, I have accepted the PacktPub’s invitation.

This book comprises of 13 chapters, each being hand-crafted to make sure that developers can learn and master the art of making beautiful web applications. No chapter is left without code snippets in it. The book provides a URL address where you can download the code samples. Moreover, the downloadable files contain instructions on how to use them.

Click here to view the rest of the review.

Meerkat, a JQuery Plugin created by Jarod Taylor, can be used as a simple promotional tool, a roost for advertisements, or even as an alternative to a splash or entry page. Meerkat slides or fades in from the top or bottom of the browser window and remains in its fixed position while the rest of the page is scrolled normally. It’s unobtrusive, cross-browser compatible, and degrades gracefully if Javascript has been disabled.

Features include:

• Slide / Fade in from Top/Bottom of the page
• Option to set the animation speed (‘slow’ or ‘fast’)
• close option – closes Meerkat until the page has been reloaded
• dontShow option – close Meerkat until the browser session has ended, or for a set amount of days, depending on the options you have defined
• Options to set background color and height

MooEditable is a simple and user friendly web-based WYSIWYG editor written in MooTools. It replaces the <textarea> element with the actual editor. The default options that you can use are: bold, italic, underline, ordered & unordered lists, indent and outdent text, undo & redo, add & remove hyperlink, add image. Like many similar editors out there, MooEditable supports “toggle view” for switching between the WYSIWYG area and the HTML source code. Moreover, it can be extended by adding more action elements to it including: a character map, the possibility to insert image with manipulation options, smiles, a basic color picker, the option to add and modify tables.

Features include:

• Clean interface
• Customizable buttons
• Tango icons
• Lightweight
• Fully degradable when Javascript disabled

The main goal of Easy’s framework is to provide a solid base for all of your front-end projects. This CSS/HTML/JavaScript framework is meant to reduce the amount of time spent on setting up the basic master HTML template by reusing the same coding techniques. Easy includes all 3 layers of front-end: structural, presentational and interactive. That makes it the true all-in-one solution for your next front-end project.

Easy is not just a CSS framework designed for building layouts. It includes built-in (JQuery powered) interactive functions and a library of preformatted and precoded CSS/HTML content blocks that you can simply paste into your master template.

Main features include:

• Rock-solid base HTML structure
• Predefined basic CSS styles for both screen and print
• Built-in set of interactive functions (no JavaScript code needed)
• Library of HTML content blocks that can be easily used and reused
• Basic file organization and possibility of expanding the library with your own code

Easy is rock-solid, true all-in-one front-end solution that you can easily use as it is or customize to fit your own needs.

Downloadify is a JavaScript and Flash library that enables you to download files on the fly files without requiring server interaction. Since it’s running client-slide, this super small library (~3KB of JavaScript, ~2KB SWF, ~2KB Image) enables faster downloads when re purposing data already contained in a page (vCard, iCal, etc.). Thus, this solution can reduce the database and server load of existing web applications.

This is not a library to ‘force download’ a file from a server. It does not interact with a server at all.

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dygraphs is a lightweight (45kb) and responsive JavaScript Visualization Library that produces interactive and zoomable charts of time series. This library is designed to display dense data sets and enable users to explore and interpret them.

Being purely client-side JavaScript, dygraphs does not send your data to any servers: the data is processed entirely in the client’s browser.

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