David Walsh ported Jonathan Snook’s jQuery menu effects to MooTools. It a quick and easy tutorial which adds cool animation without having to use Flash.

While it doesn’t improve functionality of the menu, it does add a unique touch to the everyday CSS hovers we see in almost every website nowadays. I like to keep JavaScript at a minimum if possible, but this script seems pretty lightweight and fast loading.

Check it out here.

We’ve done form validation for quite a few sites through PHP, JavaScript, or both. It’s a pretty common thing in web development especially with all the spam bots around. Also it keeps things clean when capturing user input.

Woork has three JavaScript implementations for form validation. The first implementation with MooTools seems pretty clever. The other two seem pretty standard.

If you have any interesting links for us to review regarding form validation, we would be interested in viewing them and also sharing in the blog.

I usually only like implementing JavaScript if it will add functionality to a webpage. It keeps the application running its best and performing optimally. It’s one of the same principles that I suggest with regards to using Flash as well.

With that being said I’ve seen lots of great Flash graphics/animations and creative uses for JavaScript for styling a page. DevSnippets has a list of 20 plugins based on jQuery for adding style to design elements.

I would probably say implementing some of these into your next web application will give it a clean look, but don’t overdo it. If it’s something that could be handled in CSS I would make an attempt there first, then look into JavaScript.

While I consider myself proficient in a variety of JavaScript libraries like Prototype, jQuery, and YUI, my library platform of choice at the moment is MooTools. I’ll evaluate each project on a case by case basis and each trial will be different, but I’ve found MooTools to do an adequate job for the type of projects I work on.

Web Design Ledger posted a good collection of user interface enhancements using the MooTools library. It’s got a few good tutorials that could probably be implemented in your next project.

Facebook has just released their new layout to its users today.  Just login to the site and you will be directed to the new layout.  I think they did a good job on the redesign and improved quite a few things over the previous beta versions I have seen in the past.

Facebook seems to be the standard as far as usuability in social networking.  The layout seems to load very quickly and they use AJAX technology effectively.

If you get a minute, it’s worth checking out.

While I like to keep the software installs on my machines pretty vanilla, if there is a tool that helps my productivity I’m all for checking it out.  While I’ve moved primarily to WebKit for web development, I often find myself using Firefox as well.  I keep my Firefox install to the base plus three extensions.

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. Firebug tends to be used the most by us. I can easily inspect the DOM and edit CSS inline. Those are key features for us. Also it immediately tells any JavaScript errors in the code. Another nice feature is you can print things out in the console. This helps quite a bit in debugging.
Web Developer Toolbar

Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Sometimes Firebug isn’t able to inspect the DOM so being able to view the generated source is nice. Also you are able to disable certain aspects of the page such as JavaScript or CSS or outline certain elements as well. It has a built in validator for checking your code.
YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they’re slow based on Yahoo’s rules for high performance web sites. YSlow is a nice extension to Firebug. Yahoo did a nice job of collecting some tips for improving the speed of a website. While in some sites, I can’t always get an A rating I try to make sure if there is anything I can do, that I at least make an attempt to do it.
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If you have ever been interested about the inner workings of JavaScript and haven’t already, you should take a look at several video lectures by Douglas Crockford. Douglas Crockford is a Senior JavaScript Architect at Yahoo! and has authored an O’Reilly Book: “JavaScript: The Good Parts“. The two I’d recommend starting off with are “The JavaScript Programming Language” that provides fundamental yet thorough information into the JS language such as objects and functions. Even if you have been using JS for an extended period of time, I’d recommend browsing through the lecture. The second video lecture is basically a continuation from the first, “Advanced JavaScript“.

These lectures do not delve into any of the current JS Libraries like YUI, mootools, or prototoype, but the lectures will help you extend those libraries as needed by project demands. The general Yahoo! UI (YUI) Library Theater page has many other video lectures available that get into utilizing the YUI JS library.