Here’s a pretty spectacular JS based image gallery with source.  The entire gallery is a 3d fish eye interface.  It’s incredibly easy to use, visually impressive and toolkit agnostic.  It’s performance isn’t as good as some flash based options & I personally find some of the translucency to be distracting rather than conducive to the design. All in all, this is a great gallery widget for those times you need something more impressive than traditional carousels & lighbox / thickbox implementation  Check it out here: http://www.dhteumeuleu.com/ via webappers 

Much like Google’s GWT, Microsoft’s new Volta project compiles .net assemblies into client side ajax interfaces without requiring a line of javascript.

From the press release:

You architect and build your application as a .NET client application, assigning the portions of the application that run on the server tier and client tier late in the development process. You can target either web browsers or the CLR as clients and Volta handles the complexities of tier-splitting. The compiler creates cross-browser JavaScript for the client tier, web services for the server tier, and all communication, serialization, synchronization, security, and other boilerplate code to tie the tiers together. In effect, Volta offers a best-effort experience in multiple environments without requiring tailoring of the application.

Check it out at labs.live.com/volta/

Ole Larson has released a new version of Flot:
Key Changes

• Added support for putting a background behind the default legend.
  The default is the partly transparent background color. Added
  backgroundColor and backgroundOpacity to the legend options to control
  this.
• The ticks options can now be a callback function that takes one
  parameter, an object with the attributes min and max. The function
  should return a ticks array.
• Added labelFormatter option in legend, useful for turning the legend
  labels into links.
• Fixed a couple of bugs.
• The API should now be fully documented.
• Patch from Guy Fraser to make parts of the code smaller.
• API changes: Moved labelMargin option to grid from x/yaxis.

Most notably, the new packaging includes the modified excanvas script in the zip download to greatly simplify deploying with IE support.

Read about it here:

http://ole-laursen.blogspot.com/2007/12/flot-02-released.html 

Outsource your charting to Google!  Yesterday I discussed my initial experiences with the Flot charting library.   Today, I’m going to give you a brief introduction to the excellent new Google Charting API.How it works, simply embed an image tag in your source that references the google chart API location followed by a set of parameters specifying the actual chart.  Google then renders the chart as a PNG that can be displayed in the browser.Features:

Alright, so I’ve been developing a minor frustration with Safari 3 on my Mac.  When I cut and paste between a url in firefox and a Tiny MCE window in Safari, a styled span is applied to the paste.  I’m not sure where it’s coming from. Ex.  http://nurey.com/corners.html

Alright, so sometimes you need to throw a little extra style into a project, a bevel there, rounded corner here.  Proto.Corners allows you to simply generate them programatically. Get it at nurey.com

Alright, So Flot 0.1 has been out in the wild for just under 2 days now and it’s gotten some pretty decent traction with the Ajax blogs.  I’ve taken some time over the past 24 hours to work with the library and I have to say, It’s pretty awesome. Highlights:  

• The presets really are excellent , simple charts are very little work.
• The charts look great, the integrated support for shadows & alpha channels really makes them shine
• The underlying architecture is excellent.  I’ve been able to get under the hood and add needed features without any major headaches. 
• jQuery based

Shown: A chart created with a modified version of Flot with normal range highlighted. You can get flot at: http://code.google.com/p/flot/

YUI has announced a major new release with the  immediate availability of YUI 2.4.

Key Features:

• Selector Utility: Following in the footsteps of most other toolkits, YUI now includes a CSS Selector.  This beta component includes much of the standard CSS3 selector syntax including the proposed Selector extensions.
• Charting: Using a hybrid Flash / Javascript model, a new charting component has been released with support for bar, line and pie charts.  Of special note is the fact that the charting utility utilizes the same data model as the data table implementation allowing hybrid chart / table interfaces.
• Get: dynamically load scripts and nodes via the new Get tools.
• Profiler: This combined with YUI Test will allow you to quickly and efficiently determine profiles and unit tests.  Most notably, profiler allows unit tests based on performance to be performed.
• JSON Utility: dramatically improved JSON support.

Behind the scenes:

Incremental improvments to: Calendar, Drag & Drop & Button controls.

Dramatic enhancements & customization support added to the Rich Text Editor:

Read about the release here:

http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/12/04/yuii-240/

It’s official, ExtJS 2.0 has landed.  ExtJS is one of the best toolkits out there for achieving ajax applications that rival desktop applications in interface richness.  Some of the new features in 2.0.

•  Grouping & Group Summary fields: Allows you to group related grid items and create summary rows.  Data sorts within each group set instead of across the grid.
• Scrolling tabs: You can now optimize screen Real Estate by allowing tabs to scroll off the tab par (Ala firefox)
• Anchor Layouts: Tack the dimensions of form elements to their parent container.
• Column Tree: The best of both worlds, integrate the powerful extjs grid & tree widgets

I should also point out that ExtJS continues its tradition of excellent documentation with a new API documentation center and rich set of demo applications to work from.   Check out ExtJS 2.0 here:http://extjs.com/blog/2007/12/04/ext-20-final-released/

 Proto.Menu is an amazing prototype based context menu.  It’s packaged as a prototype extension and is quite honestly, one of the best ways to through a context menu into the mix on your next project.Features:  

• iFrame Shim so IE6 plays nice
• explicit z-Index control
• Callbacks (”beforeShow”, “beforeHide”, “beforeSelect”)
• Improved Callbacks for Menu Items
• “className” option
• Semantic Markup

You can find the new version here: http://thinkweb2.com/projects/prototype/2007/12/03/protomenu-gets-facelift/ P.S.Whether or not you use prototype in your development process, I encourage all of you to take a few minutes and read  Kangax’s excellent write up of the release.  It’s a valuable look into the decision process that went into making an excellent widget significantly better.