71–80 of 95 posts
http://browserify.org/ because it will fundamentally change how you approach writing and organizing front end code. The moment you stop writing boilerplate code to glue your disparate files together and start using a simple module system you will never look back. This is more than a library, it is a way of re-thinking how you can maintain js libraries going forward.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I did prefer prototype.js in the time of ol'. Never understood why jQuery took over it, sadly.
I think it was because of the lack of documentation. Back then prototype had none and jQuery had a lot. They had a rich site and prototype had a single spartan page.
Scriptaculous, built upon prototype.js, was nice too.
For example https://starthq.com is using about 35MB of RAM and is easy to debug despite some pretty complex business logic around generating site thumbnails.
http://browserify.org/ because it will fundamentally change how you approach writing and organizing front end code. The moment you stop writing boilerplate code to glue your disparate files together and start using a simple module system you will never look back. This is more than a library, it is a way of re-thinking how you can maintain js libraries going forward.
The one that makes everyone's lives easier: jQuery. Its not sexy, but it gets the job done for pretty much everyone.
I did prefer prototype.js in the time of ol'. Never understood why jQuery took over it, sadly.
Prototype.js seemed to be targeting the problem of providing a familiar class system, standardizing some functional features, and some utility functions. It was something else, and I loved experimenting with it and reading the source, but ultimately, I think fewer people were finding this to be their pain point with the language or that using it made them significantly more productive.
Of course, considering the fact that they seem to solve different problems, it may be an interesting question why they were fighting for mindshare in the same space.
I've been having a lot of fun with https://github.com/harthur/brain (neural network implementation in JavaScript) lately. Perhaps it's not something you would use on a real, live site, but it is fun to prototype neural network stuff in the browser with easy access to the DOM, canvas, and WebGL.
I'd have to say Q promises ( https://github.com/kriskowal/q , adds promises to JS for much cleaner async code). Even though it's not "cool" in the sense that it's very low level and doesn't do fancy UI stuff, my asynchronous code has become significantly cleaner and easier to maintain through using promises rather than having callback pyramids. The ability to wait for a number of promises to resolve before firing the…
when.js is also pretty cool. I wrote a wrapper object for node that's been extremely useful https://github.com/icodeforlove/node-promise-object
Also if you like Backbone.js, don't miss Knockback.js (http://kmalakoff.github.com/knockback/). Now you have observable (view)models and collections. Definitely cool.