GitHub Rebase #34

It’s time for Rebase #34! As always, suggestions are welcome if you have a neat project you’d like to show off.

Featured Project

jquery is a cross-browser JavaScript library that makes DOM manipulation, simple animation effects, and AJAX simple. It’s used all over the web, such as on Wikipedia, WhiteHouse.gov, The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien and of course, GitHub. Just this past week, version 1.4 was released and comes packed with too many performance enhancements to list here and new features to boot. Check out the docs for everything that’s been added or changed for this release, and the new dynamic API Browser too. There’s also tutorials and videos about the new version and getting involved with the jQuery community at the 14 Days of jQuery celebration site, which is now almost half over! Now that the project is on GitHub, the best part is that you can fork it to get started adding your own features or fixes. jQuery.contains(document, "awesome")

Notably New Projects

jubilator is a new slick way to browse repos that uses the GitHub API. It’s chock full of some previously-rebased projects such as Sammy and Mustache.js. The end result is a AJAX powered repo interface with syntax highlighting that’s a lot easier to view files if you don’t want to clone the project. Try it out on your repo!

bird-show is a Lift web app that interacts with the Flickr API to show pictures. Simple, yes, but this is a great starting point for newcomers to Lift (and Scala) and comes complete with a presentation and tutorial video on the app. You can browse some wildlife photos here on the live site.

stacey is a lightweight PHP content management system that follows in Jekyll’s footsteps and works by generating static files off templates. Drop it onto your server with PHP installed, and you’re all set to start making pages. It’s baked in with a templating language that doesn’t require any PHP knowledge to use efficiently. There’s already a decent amount of Stacey sites online and a growing support forum. The codebase is quite accessible at around 500 lines, so get hacking!

vz_analysis is a small R script that runs through some of the available statistics about GDP and inflation from the author’s home country of Venezuela. It’s also a nice little example of using ggplot2, a great library that can produce nearly any kind of common stats object for your graphs. Check out the source and maybe see how this can apply to some other open datasets.

yalfs is yet another Lisp from scratch. Yes, it wouldn’t be a Rebase without a fun toy programming project, and this one is special since the author is blogging the project’s goals and progress. This implementation is done in straight C, and it already has some basic datatypes implemented. So it might be a long way from tail recursion, but this is a neat project to keep an eye on if you’re a language or functional programming geek.

Written by

Nick Quaranto

@qrush