UniKent WebDev Links of the Week: jquery nested, enquire, vagrant, emmet, backbone

Here’s some stuff I found, used, played with over the last week or so. All the below can of course be found on GitHub too.

jQuery nested

http://suprb.com/apps/nested/

A really gorgeous grid layout system. Would be great for image galleries or Windows 8 style navigation.

enquire.js

http://wicky.nillia.ms/enquire.js/

Lets developers run media queries with js. Among many other interesting things this allows the use of media queries with old (media-query) incapable browsers like IE8.

enquire.register("screen and (min-width:900px)", function() {
    // execute some js code for large-screen devices
}, true);

vagrant

http://www.vagrantup.com

Vagrant isn’t anything new, but we’ve only recently started using it in our workflow. It gives us development consistency both within our team and with the #unikent server environment.

Thanks to Alex for getting us set up with this!

emmet

http://emmet.io

A handy little time-saving plugin for html-devs that converts a pattern like…

div.row>div.span4+div.span8

into…

<div class="row">
  <div class="span4"></div>
  <div class="span8"></div>
</div>

It works in all major editors such as SublimeText, Coda, Espresso, etc.

backbone.js

http://backbonejs.org

Again, nothing new. But backbone has in the last couple of weeks released 1.0.0 which I guess marks a new stage of maturity in terms of the use of js in web development. I’m pretty sure it won’t be long before the webdev team’s using one of the many js frameworks out there. It’s a rapidly-expanding and interesting area.