W-Shadow.com

…because that’s what I tend to do. You know how it is – while browsing the web you come across some component library, API spec. or similar, and it looks so cool you wish you could immediately put it to use. I usually download those, store them somewhere, maybe read the docs/watch the demos… and leave it be. Because most often there’s no actual need to employ a template engine/scripting language/neat animation effects in your current project.

So today I’m going to give you some of those thingies I thought were “cool”, but couldn’t use at the time I found them.

Lua
Lua is a well-designed, highly robust and extensible programming language. It’s most often used for scripting, and many popular games have used it for that purpose. I really like it’s architecture and conceptual simplicity – when I read the documentation, it seemed so logical. You can find Lua bindings for many languages (including Delphi, but it might take a while). If I’m ever going to finish (;)) a game project, it will be using Lua.

Smarty
The (in)famous template engine for PHP. Might be handy if you don’t need a full-featured framework. I’m currently using it for a review site I’m building. I tried to use it for search output formatting in my CBTool site, but it turned out to be about 6-8 times slower than plain PHP, so I dropped it. In that particular case I couldn’t (easily) use result caching; It’d probably fare better if you enable the cache.

MooTools
This is an object-oriented javascript framework that’s “designed to make writing extensible and compatible code easier and faster”. It mainly caught my eye with the incredible animations and interface enhancements it allows you to implement. Go on, look at the demos, you know you want to 😉 I’m probably going to use this framework sooner or later… for example, to convert my Ticker Editor to JavaScript and make it more accessible and easy to use.

I hope you do something creative with the tools mentioned above. Cheers!