I have been delving into the Javascript Frameworks yet again. When I think of Javascript Frameworks, I automatically think “AJAX”, but that actually is just a part of what they are.

When I think of Javascript Frameworks, these 4 come straight to mind:

• ProtoType
• JQuery
• MooTools
• Script.aculo.us (derived from ProtoType)

I am sure there are others out there but these are the most popular ones that I have learnt about. I remember the first time when AJAX was being taunted with back in 2005. If I recall correctly, ProtoType was the first “Javascript Framework” to appear on the scene, taking hold of this new concept.

These days, more have popped up with very similar features and tools. They also focus on doing everyday tasks as well as handling AJAX. But admittedly, AJAX was the main reason why it spawned this new idea of creating “Frameworks” for Javascript.

The real point of this rant was to ask if anybody else knew of any other Javascript Frameworks? I want to have a look at some alternatives and see what they have to offer and to broaden my knowledge.

Thanks for reading!

Recently I had to integrate a photo gallery for one of my work projects Sony Alpha, a new digital SLR camera from Sony. My task was to display both the Exif data and the image at the same time.

For this project I had to create something new which I haven’t found on the internet before. It uses the popular Lytebox extension (a flavour of the popular Lightbox 2 javascript library) combined with a new javascript plugin that gathers Exif Data for photos via javascript with AJAX.

Other conventional methods tend to use a PHP file that grabs the exif data and switches between the data in a tab, but this is the first time I have seen of combining Lytebox with the javascript Exif plugin.

This version of Lytebox actually displays the exif data at the same time as the image. It took me many days to actually make it work but I finally managed it. It still doesn’t work in Opera or Safari but it does work for Firefox and IE.

I will bundle the files into a download so that people can use it and will attach it to this post, but I am very impressed that I managed to create the first javascript gallery that uses javascript to extract the Exif data from a photograph.

IMPORTANT UPDATE – 2008 / 10 /28

I have updated this post to include some Online Examples with the plugin in action! You can also now Download the files. I am sorry it has taken this long to get the files to you guys but it was finding the time to do it.