Okay, the news this week leans pretty heavily towards general web development stuff rather than Javascript specifically, but it’s good stuff. I promise.

ChromeKit

ChromeKit is a new library for creating desktop-like UI elements in the browser. It allows you to create windows with full chrome that allow you to do all of the things you’d expect to be able to do with windows in your main OS (i.e. drag, resize, minimize, etc.). It does this using pure HTML/CSS/JS (okay, it uses images too in a couple of spots).

ChromeKit does a pretty decent job of progressively enhancing its windows in order to give an impressive degree of cross-browser and legacy browser support. In newer browsers, there is also plenty of sexy CSS3 & vendor-prefixed goodness to make the windows look extremely slick.

Probably the coolest features of ChromeKit are the experimental Mac-like (Exposé) and Windows-like (Aero flip) window management effects. Even if you can’t imagine ever having to use ChromeKit, you might still want to take a look at the Exposé implementation as an example of some pretty heavy Computer Science stuff being brought to bear in Javascript (The library author attributes his solution to the Exposé window packing/arrangement problem to a paper called “Guided Local Search for the Three-Dimensional Bin-Packing Problem”).

PlaceFinder

PlaceFinder is a sweet new REST API from Yahoo! that gives you dead easy geocoding and reverse geocoding information all with a simple GET request. If you send PlaceFinder a street address or a place name that it knows about, it will give you the latitude and longitude for that address or place. Conversely, if you give it coordinates, it will return the address (among other data about the location). With HTML5 geolocation getting to be ubiquitous, it’s trivial to get a user’s geographic coordinates, but with PlaceFinder it’s just as easy now to take those data and turn them into a representation of the location that’s actually useful.

If you take a look at the examples in the PlaceFinder documentation, you can see a few of the hard problems that the API solves for you for free, such as localized place names and bounding boxes from a point. And of course, since PlaceFinder is just a REST API, you can easily query it through YQL, so if you’ve already got any YQL features in your application, it should be pretty trivial to start consuming PlaceFinder data.

HTML5 Rocks!

The Google Developer Relations team is publishing a new site called HTML5Rocks that contains demos and tutorials about all of the cool things you can’t do in Internet Explorer (I kid. Although they do feature Chrome Frame pretty prominently on the main page). So far the content is (unsurprisingly) absolutely top drawer. The tutorial on speeding up your webapp with HTML5 contains a ton of pearls for optimizing a forward-looking app.

HTML5Rocks is brand new, but there’s already a lot to love there, and it’s sure to only get more and more useful. So you’ll definitely want to bookmark it or stick it in your feed reader.