underscore.js has so many useful helper functions while being lightweight and unobtrusive:
Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
21–30 of 95 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#22d3.js ( http://d3js.org/ ) is the king of visualization libraries
Agree. d3 looks awesome. See these great video tutorials for it http://vimeo.com/search/sort:alphabetical/format:detail?q=%2...
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#23Rohan,
Pretty difficult to parse "coolest JS library". The "42" for that question came up as "it depends for what" ;-)
Anyway, I use this site as a quick reference to see what is new in JS world. www.functionn.in The author seems to be pretty meticulous in his updates, so there's a lot of interesting libraries. Seems like a labour of love for him. (P.S: Thanks, Hirvesh)
There's also Hakim who comes up with some interesting stuff from time to time www.hakim.se
Here's another that came up on radar lately -- http://soulwire.github.com/Makisu/
Subscribe to the smashing letter magazine's newsletters for a periodic stream of latest "cool" into your Inbox.
Hope that helps.
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#24I'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 next makes life so much easier too.
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#25The one that makes everyone's lives easier:
jQuery.
Its not sexy, but it gets the job done for pretty much everyone.
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#26I'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…
Another library that tries to make async code much cleaner is async.js (https://github.com/eligrey/async.js#readme). It uses yield and generators to abstract away the callback jungle.
For example, you can easily condense tens of lines of event code into a single `event = yield document.next("click")`
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#27Seems like a reasonable time to self promote http://pouchdb.com/ PouchDB is a full reimplementation of CouchDB inside the browser (using browser storage), you can build applications that work offline then sync your data with 'the cloud'
PouchDB rocks !!
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#28lz is the fastest lazy functional library to work with lists.
https://github.com/goatslacker/lz
Why I think it's cool? Well it's really fast, and it's lazy which allows you to work with really big arrays. Plus it's a really tiny library providing you with a streamlined set of APIs for working with lists (similar to array.js/Enumerable)
If you're working with smaller lists it's probably best to go the lodash route, but if you want it to be lazy then I believe lz is the right tool for the job.
/shameless plug
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#29My vote is for TypeScript (http://www.typescriptlang.org/). It fixes some of the problems that I encountered while creating an enterprise class application and not being able to strongly type parameters, classes, etc (which meant that I had to open up every JS file to figure out what parameters a function truly required).
Re: Ask HN: What is the coolest JS library out there?
#30Bacon.js: https://github.com/raimohanska/bacon.js -- functional reactive programming in javascript. It's another way out of callback hell when doing UI work.
Checkout Flapjax as well:
https://github.com/brownplt/flapjax/
http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/mgbcgb...
Amazingly, work on Flapjax dates all the way back to 2006! Let that sink in ... the point is that it was way ahead of its time, and with all due respect to bacon.js, I think Flapjax is still in in a league of its own with respect to how it's implemented.
I studied the internals for months back in 2010, and that learning experience was a huge catalyst in pushing me toward functional programming, Clojure and ClojureScript.
The reason Flapjax never quite caught on was in part, I think, that it was so ahead of its time. And also that its internals, while well engineered, are much harder to understand than those of jQuery and other popular libraries. It's harder to use something truly effectively if you can't quite wrap your head around how it works, and understanding Flapjax certainly takes dedication.