The I.T. Life

So there not mine. But I keep them in my toolbox, and use them regularly. So far everything I have ever needed to do Ajax related, has come from these libraries. So here they are, and a brief summary.

• Spry, by Adobe:
  • This is a great framework, though still very early, and a bit rough. It has a lot of excellent features. It has some of the more common items like sortable tables, tabbed interfaces, fun effects, all that jazz. It also has a very extensive XML library to it, it makes dealing with datasources a breeze, and takes most of the heavy work done. One of the best things this provides is a dreamweaver plugin that allows drag and drop use of all these tools. This will be a very very powerful library, once they get all the kinks worked out. My biggest complaint is that it is almost impossible to combine this XML capability with the rest of the library. It seems to die instantly
• Script.aculo.us:
  • This Library is very well known. It is based on Prototype, and is a very nice library. It’s more noticeable features are its easy as cake drag and drop, and its effects. It has a very large set of DOM utilities, and unit testing tools as well. It has a lot of support for incorporating with Ruby on Rails, and is already used by some of the biggest names on the net (Digg, and Apple for starters). This library has saved my ass a few times already, and its worth checking out.
• ASP.Net Ajax, by Microsoft:
  • So, if you are doing .Net work, then this is for you. Microsoft has a excellent Ajax library, that like Adobes, links in to there too (Visual Studio) and allows for drag and drop insertion of there fun toys. I haven’t used this in over a year, but from what I read, it has gotten much better, and it wasn’t that bad when I used it. What I loved about this, is how it allows you to link in back end code to the functions, so you can code a very slick Ajax app, without much js knowledge, or knowledge of how data goes back and forth between a server side and client side language.
• Lightbox 2:
  • This is a very small,1 purpose library. It is also very very cool. Basically, it allows you to load and view a full image, and overlay it on the screen. It makes slide shows, gallery’s and image previews a piece of cake.

Now, I have a few more links here that are based on the stuff above mostly. They are small additions or libraries, but expand these a lot.

Sortable Tables
Script.aculo.us Two Handle Slider