SproutCore drove onto the scene when MobileMe launched using it.

Since that blast, the team has been diligently working on getting a 1.0 release, and Charles Jolley has
posted on the future of SproutCore:

James Donaghue has released Peppy, the first release of his CSS 3 compliant selector engine that runs independent of one particular library (and can thus be used with any of them).

He has some bold claims on speed:

Michael Carter et al have been working on js.io, a client library that gives you networking, including Comet like support, via JavaScript.

The low level work can sit upon Comet APIs, and in the future, Web Sockets, and you get high level APIs to protocols such as:

I got to meet Aaron Newton at The Ajax Experience, and he is a thinker. He was really taking in the various talks, and interactions, and you could tell that he was trying to work out various angles on the frameworks. What makes them different? What makes them popular? Where are they going?

Creating a lot of HTML using DOM methods can be a real pain. This is what students of the Juku training course that I held two weeks ago found out quite quickly and complained about the verbosity of it all. I listened to their concerns and came up with a framework for JavaScript applications called
ViewsHandler.

Jacob Seidelin is up to more tricks, this time playing with the binary side of life and writing a library that can reading ID3 tags from MP3 files and such.

Have you ever wanted to be able to easily grab a thumbnail image that represents a website?

Eric Ferraiuolo has created Ajax-Alexa-Thumbnails on Google Code, a library that builds on YUI to do just that.

The project consists of a server-side component written in PHP which makes the cross-domain request to Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnail web service, and a JavaScript component which makes Ajax requests to configured server-side component and caches the results.

How do you call it?

ProtoChart is a new opensource library using Prototype and Canvas to create good looking charts.

Features

Kent Johnson has released YPulse a simple open source wrapper for the YUI Animation library that makes creating highlight fades and pulsing button glows a bit easier.

You pulse away with something like: