Links & Thoughts & Stuff

Justin Silverton has collected a nice set of JavaScript applications using the Canvas for various really amazing things. Check out his post and the great applications.

Yes, we’ve all been waiting for this: client side sortable tables in an unobtrusive way!

Here’s what the author has to say:

Standardista Table Sorting is a JavaScript module that lets you sort an HTML data table by any column. The module has the following advantages:

1. It works. The codebase has been tested across a large number of web browsers, and in the few that won’t allow the sorting to occur, the module degrades gracefully. In these cases the original table is not altered in any way, shape or form.
2. It’s unobtrusive. You add a reference to the Standardista Table Sorting JavaScript files in the head of your webpage, add a class of “sortable” to the tables in your page that should be sorted and you’re done.
3. It’s fast. Sorting a column in an eight column, one hundred row, table takes on average between 100 and 200 milliSeconds in my testing. That’s just a tenth of a second for a bigger table than you’re often likely to put on a webpage.
4. It knows about different data types. The current version of Standardista Table Sorting will sort IP Addresses, Currency, Number, Plain Text and Dates, and the best bit is it works out what type of sorting to do without you having to tell it. If you know a small amount of JavaScript it’s also trivial to add new data types to sort by.

Now go an get Standardista Table Sorting!

Who says javascript is not able to create graphics is wrong. Check out this link where you see an example of a graph plotter written in javascript:

http://www.walterzorn.de/grapher/grapher.htm

Here you find the „How I made it“ section:

http://www.walterzorn.de/jsgraphics/jsgraphics.htm

If you need to debug your javascript code I recommend using the Venkman javascript debugger for Firefox. But it seems there is another star rising at the sky calles Firebug. The documentation sounds interesting – I’ll put it to my todo list.
FireBug – JoeHewitt.com

Who needs desktop tools if you have a bunch of good links to online tools? This is a great AJAX example on how to evaluate regular expressions directly in your browser. A nice feature: The app supports PCRE, Posix and Javascript engine to evaluate.

an AJAX Regular EXpression eValuator

Harry wrote an interresting article about Javascript Inheritance in the DHTML Blog over at SitePoint. The given approach looks pretty straightforward and if I’ll ever do some Javascript again, I might give it a try

Read the article SitePoint Blogs » Javascript Inheritance

A really nice AJAX implementation. Just have a look to the counter in the top of the page Coool!

Firefox Counter

ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript „compression“ system. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style.

For all of you dev people who can’t get enough of JavaScript I recommend having a look at the dojo toolkit.

Dojo ShrinkSafe

Not much to say, this is a really cooooool online application: Just write your jacascript code, test it, format it and afterwards safe it as a bookmarklet. Unfortunatly the current version doesn’t work properly when safing the bookmarklet

Click Me – Scriptedit

This one’s in my bookmarks for some days now and I still think it’s a great approach and implementation even if it eats up all my CPU just to show a tooltip Here’s what the developers have to say:

Zimbra is a community for building and maintaining next generation collaboration technology. Currently, this technology is available as a beta version. At Zimbra, our goal is to make e-mail, calendar, contacts and other communications technologies the best they can be. We believe that by opening the technology to the community we will ensure that we can maximize innovation, scale and the ability to co-exist with existing messaging systems.

We encourage you to check out the demo of our beta to see why we are so excited:

So, as already said … Go and check out Zimbra now!