Wow. Slow week on the Javascript front. Fortunately there are at least a few people still hard at work out there, and here are some of the things they built:

Yeti

YUI already has one of the best automated javascript testing frameworks on offer. When you consider how easily and thoroughly it integrates with Selenium and Hudson, it also has one of the best Javascript CI toolchains out there (although there’s still an unfortunately small number of competitors in that space). The drawback to the whole YUITest CI workflow is that you have to commit code to your source control in order to kick it off. Reid Burke, the newest member of the YUI team has just built a solution to that quandary. Yeti is a command-line tool that fires up a NodeJS server that serves up the page with your tests on it, and then listens for YUITest results. When it gets the results back, it reports them to stdout. The advantage of this approach is that you can point any browser you like at the test page, and you’ll be able to get results from it. Burke’s serving suggestion for this approach is that you can use localtunnel to create a public proxy to your Yeti server that you can use for things like mobile testing, or even getting a client to hit the server with the actual browser they’re using to report a bug. That is totally slick.

PaintbrushJS

PaintbrushJS is a very cool new utility from no less than Dave Shea that allows you to apply Photoshop-like effects to inline images and even CSS backgrounds. It works by importing the image into a canvas context, applying the effects, and then exporting a data URI from the canvas–an extremely cool technique indeed. The kinds of effects you can apply are things like, blur, sepia, noise, and a handful of other things. Once you’ve included the library, all you need to do is add a data attribute to the element containing the image you want to edit that specifies what effects to apply.