Pixastic is an open source JavaScript image processing library.

It uses HTML5 Canvas element that enables accessing to raw pixel data.

Supported effects are:

• desaturation/greyscale
• invert
• flipping
• brightness/contrast adjustment
• hue/saturation
• emboss
• blur & more

There is an image editor built with it & the library is well-documented.

Compatibility: All Major Browsers (IE requires ExCanvas)
Website: http://www.pixastic.com/

Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. It builds on several contributed code bases (nWidgets, Burstlib, f(m)), which is why we refer to it sometimes as a “unified” toolkit. Dojo aims to solve some long-standing historical problems with DHTML which prevented mass adoption of dynamic web application development.

Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more usable, responsive, and functional. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. You can use the lower-level APIs and compatibility layers from Dojo to write portable JavaScript and simplify complex scripts. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. You can use the Dojo build tools to write command-line unit-tests for your JavaScript code. The Dojo build process helps you optimize your JavaScript for deployment by grouping sets of files together and reuse those groups through “profiles”. You can see dojo in action or download the dojo toolkit here.

Effective data visualization allows users to easily understand and consume otherwise complex, boring information. Plotting your data can serve as a replacement to tabular data, and is also a great way to add practical graphics to your web page or application. There are a variety of ways you can plot data on-the-fly – but in this article we’ll focus on 10 excellent JavaScript solutions to graphing/charting data that allow you to process data client-side. You’ll also find a link to one of the demonstration pages of the script so that you can see it in action.

Flot

Flot is a data-plotting library developed by IOLA built on top of jQuery. It’s easy to use, yet feature-packed and elegant. It has a mouse-controlled zooming feature (click and drag over the target area) and some simple user interactivity features such the ability to determine the x and y coordinates of mouse clicks.

Demo: Different graph types

Flotr Javascript Plotting Library

Flotr, written by Bas Wenneker of Solutoire.com, is a plotting solution inspired by Flot that uses the Prototype JS library and excanvas.js. It supports most modern browsers including Internet Explorer 6, and has many features of Flot including mouse tracking, selection, mouse-tracking features.

Demo: Basic Legend Example

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SmartMarkUP is a flexible & lightweight JavaScript library that turns any textarea into a markup editor.

It can be configured to edit HTML, CSS, XML, Wiki syntax & BBCode.

The library is unobtrusive & degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled.

SmartMarkUP has a simple and powerful API. Styles can be changed, new markups can be implemented, extra buttons and submenus can be created & more.

It also supports keyboard shortcuts for easier usage & has add-on support like color picker, search-replace, special character picker (and new ones can be created).

Compatibility: All Major Browsers Except IE6
Website: http://www.phpcow.com/smartmarkup/
Demo: http://www.phpcow.com/smartmarkup/examples
Download: http://www.phpcow.com/smartmarkup/downloads/

A quick snippet of JavaScript to convert values to pixels from any string. Below is a quick function:

function px(val) {
    return parseInt(val)+"px";
  }
}

To use it, just wrap your string with the function
and it should convert it to pixels for you:

var oldValue = '65';
var newValue = px(oldValue);

Classic ASP is losing its popularity, or already lost it. On the other hand, there are many developers who use it.

And, it is hard to find new & exciting projects about classic ASP but here is one: ajaxed, an ASP library with built-in Ajax support.

With the release of ajaxed 2, the library is very mature, well documented & supported with examples.

It includes a debugging tool (Logger), has an e-mail wrapper, datagrid, a validator control & much more.

ajaxed is also fully UTF-8 compatible and has support for MySQL, MSSQL, sqlite, MS Access & Oracle.

It is a great library to speed up the development process for classic ASP developers.

In this article Guillermo Rauch’s will go through the creation of a custom navigation bar with some cute Javascript effects that will certainly impress your friends and the visitors coming to your website. This custom navigation bar needs Mootools library, this beauty is contained in 1.5kb. Not only that, but it’s also cross browser (tested on Internet Explorer 6/7, Firefox and Safari) and accessible.

Scrollable is a flexible & lightweight (3.9kb) jQuery plugin for creating scrollable contents.

Any content (HTML, video, text..) can be used as a scrolling item. And, it supports vertical scrolling besides the standard horizontal scrolling which makes it very ideal, specially for news sites or portals to present the flash contents.

Other features of Scrollable are:

• Setting the number of visible items
• Mouse, arrow keys and mousewheel (requires mousewheel.js) support
• Programmatic actions: next, prev, nextPage, prevPage, seekTo, begin, end
• Know when list is scrolled with custom event listener

This jQuery plugin is built by the FlowPlayer team (see WRD post) and includes great examples (this & this) with FlowPlayer integration.

CSS Drop-Down Menu Framework is a free & cross-browser solution to create good looking menus.

Download package already contains examples but new themes can be created very easily.

Menus can be transformed by only changing the class name. Available transformations are:

• horizontal
• vertical left-to-right
• vertical right-to-left
• horizontal linear
• horizontal upwards.

The framework normally uses only CSS but for IE6, there is a JavaScript file that must be included.

CSSPlay is presenting a chic circular menu that can have sub-menus.

Within a limited space, the menu offers a comprehensive browsing experience.

There is also a small information that can be displayed when an item is hovered.

It uses ordered-lists for all major browsers & uses some tables if the browser is IE6.

P.S. The menu is not totally free. A donation is required for use.