Has.js

Has.js is a new library from Dojo’s Pete Higgins and some other notable Javascripters that allows for easy and systematic Javascript feature detection. The idea is that you have a simple, consistent API for testing whether the interpreter running your code has some or other feature (e.g. querySelectorAll, Function.prototype.bind, and lots of other hotness). This is going to be a huge boon to framework authors, since it gives them an easy way to leverage the fast native versions of their functionality they’re building where it’s supported, and fall back to their own hand-rolled implementations where it’s not.

Has’s developers are careful to note that it’s still early days for the project, so don’t go writing any production code with it, and don’t expect the API to stay the same from day to day. Still, this is a great project, and one that library developers and anybody else who wants clean performant code (i.e. all of you) will be able to make great use of in the future.

(h/t Badass Javascript)

Promote JS

You know what sucks? When you hit up your search engine of choice for a little bit of Javascript help (maybe because you can never remember the right way to call Array.splice()) and you end up at some outdated or just plain wrong message board linkrot or <cough>W3Schools</cough>. Promote JS is a new crowdsourced SEO project to fix this problem. The idea is that you (and all of your friends) put a badge like this one…

…on your site. The badge has a link to Mozilla’s excellent Javascript documentation, and that link’s title has some handy keywords to help boost the SEO juice of thorough, accurate, well-maintained documentation. Do your part to help the community, and add a badge to your site. And maybe even more importantly, when you’re blogging about code, don’t forget to link the stuff your talking about back to some good documentation.

Unify

Unify is an interesting new framework that aims to be a one-size fits all solution for building native-like desktop, mobile, and (in the near future) tablet applications. Essentially, it lets you build HTML/CSS/JS applications and deploy them to various platforms by means of 3rd party wrappers for your code. If you want to deploy to a high-end mobile device, you’d use the included version of PhoneGap. Ditto Adobe AIR, if you’re deploying to the desktop. Additionally, Unify makes use of Sass and Qooxdoo for some sugar around the CSS and JS parts of the application.

SproutCore 1.4

After several rounds of release candidates, SproutCore 1.4 has finally been released! The new release feature touch support, as well as an Interface Builder-like GUI application that is itself written in SproutCore. Even better, if you’re already used to working in IB, you can even compile your actual XCode .xibs into SproutCore code using the SCXIB library. There are a ton of other new features in the library, so check out the SproutCore site, grab the Sproutcore gem, or pull the code down from Github