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When it comes to design of modern web-applications, Ajax is considered as a standard approach. Interactive solutions for lightboxes, form validation, navigation, search, tooltips and tables are developed using Ajax libraries and nifty Ajax scripts. Ajax is useful and powerful. However, when using Ajax, one should keep in mind its drawbacks in terms of usability and accessibility. With an extensive use of Ajax, you can easily confuse your visitors offering too much control and too many features.

Nevertheless, it’s important to know what’s possible, particularly since you can develop new ideas further, improving the quality of your web applications. Since our last article 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding many things have changed — new scripts were introduced, new creative solutions were developed, new robust development kits have been released. They all are supposed to serve a better user experience and provide more comfort for web-developers.

This post presents over 60 new useful Ajax scripts, libraries and solutions which you can use in your future projects. License agreements can change from time to time — please read them carefully before using the script in a commercial web-application.

You might want to consider checking out the following related posts:

• 30 Scripts For Galleries, Slideshows and Lightboxes presents scripts of impressive slideshows, lightboxes and galleries you can use for effective presentations of your images,
• 40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS with handy tooltips scripts for intuitive and well-designed visual clues,
• Data Grids with AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript with free solutions for data grids, developed with AJAX, DHTML and/or JavaScript,
• Powerful CSS-techniques For Effective Coding which features 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective CSS-coding.

Please notice: the overview presented below is not just a yet-another-one-collection of Ajax-scripts. It’s a collection of really useful ones, the ones you can use in almost every project you’ll be working on.

Useful Ajax Scripts

Mocha UI
Mocha is a web applications user interface library built on the Mootools javascript framework. The Mocha GUI components are made with <canvas> tag graphics.

An Accessible Slider
“Recently we designed and developed an interface that required a slider control, which allows users to choose one or a range of values on a continuum. Values on a slider can represent anything from hours on a clock to the volume on a music player to a complex, proprietary data set. In its simplest form, the slider is displayed as an axis of values with a handle to drag and select a value, or two handles for selecting a range.”

FancyUpload
Swf meets Ajax. An upload widget that allows queued multiple-file upload including progress bars.

Coda Popup Bubbles
“When you move the mouse over the popup, this triggers a mouseout on the image used to trigger the popup being shown. I’ll explain (carefully) how to make sure the effect doesn’t fail in this situation.”

Facebook Style Input Box
The approach to re-create the autocomplete method of adding multiple recipients to messages used on Facebook. “I’d seen it in Facebook before, which has a really decent implementation of this concept (it work well, but it doesn’t respect any modern programming principles; basically, it’s a big tag soup with lots of inline Javascript)”

Rich Text Editor
The Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea. It allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images. The Rich Text Editor’s Toolbar is extensible via a plugin architecture so that advanced implementations can achieve a high degree of customization. The tool is based upon Yahoo UI Library.

iCarousel
iCarousel is an open source (free) javascript tool for creating carousel like widgets.

Ext JS – JavaScript Library
An extensive JavaScript-Framework with numerous modules and components such as tables, trees, windows, layouts, forms, and tabs. All of them look as if they’ve been used in standard desktop-applications.

Moo Wheel
The purpose of this script is to provide a unique and elegant way to visualize data using Javascript and the <canvas>-object. This type of visualization can be used to display connections between many different objects, be them people, places, things, or otherwise. The script is licensed under an MIT-style license.

Product Slider
This ‘product slider’ is similar to a straight forward gallery, except that there is a slider to navigate the items, i.e. the bit the user controls to view the items.

Taggify Tooltips
This post demonstrates how you can use Taggify widget to enhance your blog with the functionality to show popup tooltips for parts of your images.

Gettyone Search Options Menu
Learn how to implement a Gettyone-like search options menu which display a layer with some search options below the input search field, when an user click on the input field to searching for something.

Moo Canvas
Modern browser support the <canvas> tag to allow 2D command-based drawing. This script provides the third dimension, allowing for browser drawing with pure JavaScript. To use, web developers only need to include a single script tag in their existing web pages.

Relay – Ajax Directory Manager
Relay is an Ajax-powered file management library. It has a multi-user access restriction, allowing the administrator to control user access to uploaded files. Features: drag-n-drop files and folders, dynamic loading file structure, upload progress bar, thumbnail view, including pdf and multiple users & accounts.

GlassBox
GlassBox is a compact Javascript User Interface (UI) library, which use Prototype and Script.aculo.us for some effects. With GlassBox you can build transparent border, colorful layouts and “Flash-like” effects. Take a look at the site itself: you can use the keyboard navigation: Keys 1-8 (display page), arrows left/right (previous/next page) and arrows up/down (Scroll content).

qGallery
qGallery is a Prototype-based gallery script which automatically takes care of the image processing, offers multipple viewing modes and comes with a number of transition effects.

Amberjack
Amberjack is a lightweight Open Source library, enabling you to create site tours. The JavaScript library is lightweight (~4K), stable, LGPL licensed, browser compatible, set up in 2 minutes & super-easy to customize.

GWT-Ext Widget Library
GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. It uses GWT and Ext.

Flexigrid
Lightweight but rich data grid with resizable columns and a scrolling data to match the headers, plus an ability to connect to an xml based data source using Ajax to load the content.

cforms II
cforms is a plugin for WordPress, offering convenient deployment of multiple contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page. The form submission utilizes AJAX, falls back, however, to a standard method in case AJAX/Javascript is not supported or disabled.

Masked Input Plugin
A masked input plugin for the jQuery javascript library. It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc). It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6/7, Firefox 1.5/2, Safari, and Opera.

Oversized Sliding Tabs
Sliding Tabs is a mootools 1.11 plugin which adds a pretty neat effect. It’s a clone of something seen on Panic Software’s Coda site, which in turn is very heavily inspired by a widget used in the iTunes Music Store. Similar jQuery solution.

Custom Checkbox with jQuery
This script provides you with the ability to customize the design of checkboxes in your web forms. You can use the default skin and the Safari skin which are provided with the package.

NicEdit
NicEdit is a Javascript/AJAX inline content editor to allow easy editing of web site content on the fly in the browser. It integrates into any site in seconds to make any element/div editable or convert standard textareas to rich text editing.

AJAX Instant Messenger
is a browser-based instant messaging client. It uses AJAX to create a near real-time IM environment that can be used in conjunction with community, intranet, and social websites. No refreshing of the page is ever needed for this "web application" to work, as everything is updated in real-time via JavaScript.

Mootools animated sidebar menu
This tutorial explains how to implement an animated menu using mootools. You can see how it works directly from mootools site.

LiveValidation
LiveValidation is a small open source javascript library built for giving users real-time validation information as they fill out forms. Not only that, but it serves as a sophisticated validation library for any validations you need to make elsewhere in your javascript, it is not just limited to form fields.

Creating a table with dynamically highlighted columns
There is a number of impressive things happening within this small area.

Tablecloth
Tablecloth is lightweight, easy to use, unobtrusive way to add style and behaviour to your html table elements. By simply adding 2 lines of code to your html page you will have styled and active tables that your visitors will love :) Try to mouseover or click on a table below.

Unobtrusive Table Actions Script
An attempt at writing an unobtrusive (and fast) script that adds commonly required "actions" to data tables. Can Zebra stripe the table. And supports row hover, column hover and cell hover effects

FancyForm
FancyForm is a powerful checkbox replacement script used to provide the ultimate flexibility in changing the appearance and function of HTML form elements. It’s easy to use and degrades gracefully on all older, non-supporting browsers.

Starbox
Starbox allows you to easily create all kinds of rating boxes using just one PNG image. The library is build on top of the Prototype javascript framework. For some extra effects you can add Scriptaculous as well. Check the demos below to see what Starbox is all about and read on for more information on how to customize your own Starboxes.

Style Your Website’s Search Field with JS/CSS
Continuing to provide unobtrusive solutions, CSSG is happy to present SearchField. It serves as a way to style your search field and add behavior without any additional JavaScript or modifications in your markup. It features plug & play onfocus and onblur behaviors and auto suggestion like you’ve never seen before.

The sliding Date-Picker
Due to the development of Qash.nl, a Dutch personal finance website full of cool javascript features, it’s somewhat quiet around here. But to keep you satisfied, we present the sliding date-picker. This element enables you to pick dates with a simple slider bar. By dragging the bar over the time-line, the dates change instantly.

Carousel
Prototype UI. Carousel are great to display a large set of data like images.

minishowcase
minishowcase is a small and simple php/javascript online photo gallery, powered by AJAX that allows you to easily show your images online, without complex databases or coding, allowing to have an up-and-running gallery in a few minutes.

Timeline
Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally.

Displaying source code with Ajax
The script fires off an Ajax request, gets the document the link points to, replaces the special characters and adds line numbers.

mooSlideBox 3
The mooSlideBox v3 is a small and slim ajax based extension or replacement of the common "lightbox" that can be found on nearly every page. This lightbox clone works in IE 6/7, Opera and Firefox.

Accessible News Slider
Accessible News Slider is a JavaScript plugin built for the jQuery library. It meets the accessibility requirements as outlined by WCAG 1.0.

jsProgressBarHandler (Dynamic Unobtrusive Javascript Progress/Percentage Bar)
jsProgressBarHandler is a Javascript based Percentage Bar / Progress Bar, inspired upon JS-code by WebAppers and CSS-code by Bare Naked App. Next to a structural rewrite of the WebAppers code, this javascript progress bar can easily be extended and tweaked just by setting a few parameters.

CNN Style Scrolling Ticker with the Marquee Toolkit Control
Besides scrolling the items from right to left, the liScroll plugin supports two additional features

mooSocialize – ajax based social bookmark widget
Enough of having to submit interesting articles by hand to your favorite social networks and newsgroups? Then this is for you. Based on ajax, this small widget allows to integrate many many bookmarks for every post on your blog, website etc.

CheckBoxList hover extender
“We created an AJAX Control Toolkit Extender that asynchronously calls a web service method (or a page method) to obtain the information displayed in the popup control, when the user hovers over an item.”

Cornerz
Bullet Proof Corners plugin for jQuery using Canvas/VML

Lightview
Lightview was built to change the way you overlay content on a website. Works on all modern browsers

lightWindow
Another script you can use to integrate lightboxes and online-galleries in your web-pages. This lightweight script supports 5 different types of Media: Pages, Inline Content, Media (movies, SWF, etc), images (galleries, single), External Websites (via IFrame). Photo: Patrick Cheatham.

DatePicker using Prototype and Scriptaculous
An unobtrusive and flexible date picker widget which uses Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries. 52 More Calendars and Date Picker Designs.

ModalBox
ModalBox is a JavaScript technique for creating modern modal dialogs or even wizards (sequences of dialogs) without using conventional pop-ups and page reloads.

Accordion v2.0
A lightweight accordion that is built with Scriptaculous, has vertical, horizontal and nested styles and works properly in every browser.

New unobtrusive dynamic flickr badge
A compact Flickr-Badge for presentation of Flickr-images with a navigation option.

13 Awesome Javascript CSS Menus
13 “fresh” JavaScript+CSS-based navigation menus in a brief overview. Among other things Slashdot Menu and Sexy Sliding Menu displayed below.

Further Ajax scripts

Maillist
An AJAX addon for your site, a Mail list. An email address can be submitted without having to reload the whole page.

ClickHeat
ClickHeat is an Ajax-powered visual heatmap of clicks on a page, showing hot and cold click zones. You can also use the heatmap generator outside ClickHeat for your own applications, using PHP and GD library.

Prototype UI
Prototype UI is an open-source configurable Modal Window system. The library allows you to add a window or a dialogue. Windows can have a shadow and be scannable; modal mode is available, and there is a window manager for Web OS behavior.

Protoload makes it easy to show the User what is going on.
Imagine a complex Rich Internet Application using different hidden requests and processes working side by side. Protoload makes it easy to show the User what is going on.

Step by Step – Show and explain visitors what your page has for them
You might have encountered interactive demos created with screencasting and screengrabbing software that explain an interface to users in a step-by-step manner. This is exactly what this script does for web sites.

FontSize slider
Enables visitors to define the font-size of the page.

Facebox
Facebox is a jQuery-based, Facebook-style lightbox which can display images, divs, or entire remote pages. It’s simple to use and easy on the eyes. Download the tarball, view the examples, then start enjoying the curves.

Resources

• Ajax Rain is a growing collection of Ajax / Javascript / DHTML examples and demos you can download for free. The site currently offers over 1000 examples.
• 14 Cool Mootools Scripts lists useful Ajax-scripts for the Mootools library.
• 45 Fresh jQuery Plugins offers a growing list of references for jQuery plugins and solutions.