Javascript Libraries – Adding polish to your site the easy way

The more web development I do, the more I’m grateful for the plethora of amazing Javascript libraries out there. It’s never been simpler to add advanced front-end functionality like drag-and-drop, animations, or sortable, paginated, searchable tables (like those used in our Type-In Traffic Finder, for instance). Here’s a few of my favorite javascript libraries.

1. YUI
YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library) is one of my favorite Javascript libraries. The vast majority of our domain tool dashboard is written using it. YUI has probably the best collection of widgets and user interface elements of any Javascript library, as well as great documentation, and great community support. It does tend to be more complicated and verbose than some other libraries when doing simple DOM manipulation, but that should change when YUI 3 is released.

2. JQuery
JQuery is currently my favorite Javascript library. If you’re a web developer and you’re not familiar with
it, I highly recommend learning it as soon as possible. JQuery’s tagline is “write less, do more” and that pretty much sums up my experience with it. Writing code in jQuery is very concise, but very powerful. One of my favorite features: Any DOM element can be animated just by calling the animate() function and then specifying the CSS property to animate (opacity or height for instant). JQuery also has many widgets in their jQuery UI library, but it is not as fully developed as YUI.

3. Prototype/Scriptaculous
I have less experience with Prototype and Scriptaculous, than with YUI and jQuery, but this is another mature and well-known library. Prototype focuses on DOM manipulation and more core functionality, and Scriptaculous is a UI library built on top of Prototype. These libraries are included with or supported by many popular web frameworks like Ruby on Rails and CakePHP.

Even if you’re not a developer you can use these libraries to snaz up your site.
You can find many good tutorials on adding javascript effects at NetTuts. There are many other sites with lots of prebuilt widgets and tutorials that can be found via Google.

So what do you think? Any other libraries or resources to add?

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