I’ve been playing around with a few freely available Javascript libraries as of late, and I’ve been so very impressed at the quality and ease of use of what’s out there. I’m sure that most web developers are fairly well versed in the art, but since my career took a slightly different path until late, I’ve missed the proverbial boat and have some catching up to do. As far as technology, I’ve been particularly impressed with the prototype library, script.aculo.us, the control suite from livepipe, lightview, and a lot of the stuff on ajax rain. The people that make these libraries are incredible – very professional, dedicated, and willing to give their work freely to the community at large.

This site is hosted using WordPress as the engine. What I hadn’t realized until late is that the platform actually uses a lot of these tools already. The state of these free tools allows rapid prototyping and development of websites that have extremely valuable functionality built in. This differs so much from just a few years ago, when the best tools available were tutorials and maybe a few pieces of css or javascript that would need to be largely rewritten on a per-application basis. What a great and exciting time to be a web developer!