Once again we are witnessing the game change before our eyes. Whether you are a web designer or a web developer, you can't help but get excited when you consider the possibilities of HTML 5. From advanced animations and 3d effects to data presentation and interactive application interfaces, it's no surprise companies like Adobe © are putting heavy focus on developing new concepts and powerful tools to command this new weapon of mass attraction. Will HTML5 Replace FLASH?

Many popular frameworks, CMS's and ecommerce platforms come preloaded with a JavaScript library like jQuery or Prototype. Most of the time, these systems heavily depend on those libraries for functionality on both the frontend and the backend; removing it or changing the variables it uses could severly break the site.

As the desire for neater and sleeker user interface increases, the ability to provide a website administrator with the ability to sort content that will appear on a list page. Granted, there are a number of great modules that allow for the sorting of pre-defined nodes, but sometimes you just have to sort items (whether they are nodes or rows from a custom table) in a completely custom way.

In a previous blog post, I gave a quick overview of how closures work in JavaScript. Closures are a very powerful tool in JS development and can be used in many different design patterns. In this post, we'll look at how the module pattern works thanks to these closures.

I'm pleased to introduce Unleashed Technologies' first open-source project, "maxchars"!  maxchars is a jQuery plugin for easily adding and enforcing character limits on input elements with a friendly UI.  It works similar to Twitter, where users are presented with a helpful message stating the number of remaining characters or notifying them if they've exceeded the limit.  Similar plugins already exist, but we wanted to design something far simpler and easy to integrate.

JavaScript has quickly become an important language used in many aspects of website development. Although it may look very simple and straightforward to new programmers, it has several features and "gotchas" that may leave you scratching your head, wondering why your code doesn't work. This article will help you understand some of these ideas and explain how you can implement them to instantly improve your scripts.

Closures are a very powerful yet underused feature unique to of JavaScript (and other ECMAScript languages). They essentially provide your code with private variables that other scripts can't access. This is accomplished by exploiting three interesting features (or "quirks") of JavaScript:

Exactly one year ago, John Resig and the jQuery team released version 1.3. This release came packed with feature upgrades, such as the new ultra-fast Sizzle selector engine, live event bindings, and more. Development has been rather quiet since then, leading many to speculate that nothing major was going on - boy were they wrong!

One common theme in great user interfaces is the ability to edit content in place without page reload. If you are displaying any kind of editable content to a user, that user will almost expect the ability to manipulate their content without having to work through one or more page reloads. Javascript is the perfect candidate to utilize this type of functionality within your website. More specifically, the jQuery framework will simplify your task even more.