iCarousel is an open source JavaScript tool for creating carousel like widgets.  Based on the MooTools JS library, iCarousel is a nice widget with lots of possibility for customization.

Cal Henderson of Flickr fame has penned a great article for Vitamin that will show you how to  Serve JavaScript Fast!  As our web applications get richer and more interactive our JavaScript files seem to grow accordingly large.  Add on to that the weight of some of the popular JS libraries, and pretty soon your page weight is up over 100K!  Follow Cal’s tips to make sure you pages load as quickly as they can.

Are you statisfied is a really fun little script that shows you in real-time where people are visiting your blog from.  Simply add a small JavaScript snippet anywhere in your blog template and you can visually track your location based hits.  You can check out my blogs activity at http://statisfy.net/dmm.

Dustin Diaz continues to amaze me and educate me with his amazing ninja JavaScript techniques!  This time, he has a fantastic article on Digital Web Magazine titled Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today.  Even if you’ve been coding JS for years, you should read this - I promise you’ll learn something!

MiniAjax.com has a showroom of nice looking simple downloadable DHTML and AJAX scripts that can add some zip and spice to your websites. The scripts have all been created and hosted by other authors, but this is a nice place to start to browse some of the most popular scripts of the past year or so.

Prototype 1.5: The Complete Documentation has just been released. This 166 page pdf e-book was written by Sam Stephenson and the Prototype team so should be an authoritative source of docs.

Mapstraction is a javascript library that hides differences between mapping APIs. It provides a common set of JavaScipt functions that lets you switch seamlessly between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s javascript mapping APIs.

A couple of weeks ago, two web based services launched that allow any web designer to add a commenting and rating system to any page they create. Both of these systems can be incorporated into your pages by adding a very simple snippet of JavaScript code to your page.

• Star It! is a star rating system that allows visitors to rate your content using a 5 star system.
• JS Kit if a fully featured threaded comment system.

Of course the upside of these tools are that they are simple to use. The downside is that your data is stored in somebody else’s database so you need to have some trust that these services will be around for a while.

DOM Tool is a cleaver web-based tool that gives you a text area to enter structured HTML, then creates the appropriate JavaScript to create the same HTML content using the DOM. I could have used this a few months ago while I was working on a DOM-based project.

Timeline is a DOM/JavaScript based widget for visualizing time-based events. Data is fed to the widget using simple XML or JSON. Check out their examples to see how cool this project is. Also, you might want to check out RSS to Timeline that will take any RSS feed and place it into a timeline widget.