jQuery/JavaScript Tools and Plugins Worth Checking Out

Sure, recently I mocked the fact that our industry is inundated with scripts, boilerplates, libraries, and frameworks. But that was just a light-hearted look at the state of our industry. I still think there are tons of tools that are valuable and worth knowing about for front-end developers.

So here’s another list of tools and other goodies that might be of interest to JavaScript developers.

Redesigning the Country Selector

“During our recent checkout study we found several usability issues when using a drop-down for your country selector: a lack of overview, unclear sorting, scrolling issues, inconsistent UIs, a lack of context on mobile devices, and finally, they break the user’s tab-flow. So we took it upon ourselves to redesign the country selector.” The plugin has an FAQ, Docs, and is offered under the MIT license.

visitor.js

visitor.js is a small piece of JavaScript that provides you with information on your site’s visitors, so you can target them with custom-tailored content.

jQuery Boilerplate

“This project won’t seek to provide a perfect solution to every possible pattern, but will attempt to cover a simple template for beginners and above.” The code is well-commented, and it even has something I just noticed recently in plugin boilerplates: the semi-colon at the beginning of the file. Interesting trick, which is also used in this boilerplate.

js2coffee

A very cool looking online tool that converts JavaScript to CoffeeScript and vice-versa, helping you to “migrate projects to CoffeeScript by compiling your JavaScript code into CoffeeScript.”

Backbone Boilerplate

“Organize your application in a logical filesystem, develop your Models/Collections/Views/Routers inside modules, and build knowing you have efficient code that will not bottleneck your users.” If you’re familiar with or have used Backbone, this boilerplate might be worth a look.

Sugar JavaScript Library

Yep, another JavaScript library. It’s described as “a JavaScript library that extends native objects with helpful methods. It is designed to be intuitive, unobtrusive, and let you do more with less code.”

hastebin

Sure, there are quite a few code sharing apps, but here’s another one. Dubbed as “the elegant pastebin”, the about page says “Most of the time I want to show you some text, its coming from my current console session. We should make it really easy to take code from the console and send it to people.” Looks useful for very quick code sharing, but unlike other sites that seem to keep saved code indefinitely, hastebin will delete untouched code after 30 days.

SyntaxHighlight.in

This looks like a pretty cool way to embed code in a blog post or web page. After you ensure that the page includes the CSS and JavaScript files, the tool itself lets you paste your code into a text field, then you give it some instructions including language, lines to highlight, color theme, and background color. Then you just embed the generated HTML.

Got More?

As always, if you have built or know of any tools or resources (free or paid) that would be of interest to front-end developers, tweet me, contact me, or post a comment below.