The BBC, the channel / company most people will know as a staple of British culture with it's myriad of TV channels that transmit both entertainment and news, has released their very own JavaScript framework. If you think about it though they're only releasing publicly something which they'd already created and were using for their own site though they've probably tidied it up a little.
The new framework is called Glow, and their API documentation is already shaping up quite nicely. I know it's not technically new as they've had libraries available for a while just the 1.5 release has not long been announced. The BBC has tried to stay current with web technologies on their own site, and they've continued to keep this trend in the way they distribute the code - it available on GitHub.
The framework is broken down into:
- glow
- The glow namespace and core library.
- glow.anim
- Simple and powerful animations.
- glow.data
- Serialising and de-serialising data
- glow.dom
- Accessing and manipulating the DOM
- glow.dragdrop
- Simplifying drag and drop behaviour
- glow.embed
- Detect and embed Flash objects
- glow.events
- Native browser and custom events
- glow.forms
- Validating HTML Forms.
- glow.lang
- Useful language functions.
- glow.net
- Sending data to & from the server
- glow.tweens
- Functions for modifying animations
They also have a number of pre-built widgets for autosuggest, image carousel, WYSIWYG editor, info panel, masking and overlays, sliders and sortables.
I think with the ever growing number of JavaScript frameworks which are appearing there's a lot to consider when choosing which one is right for you - how much overhead is there, how much additional coding is required, does it do everything you want it to do, etc.
Personally I use jQuery these days after having recoded all of my Prototype / Script.aculo.us stuff so I doubt I will use the BBC's JS framework in a production environment, but it won't stop me having a little play with it.
