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Easel JS is an open source JavaScript library designed to make HTML5's Canvas element easier to work with. It was developed by gskinner.com, a firm best known for its Flash work, with Flash developers in mind. It's currently in alpha and includes a hierarchical display list, a core interaction model, and helper classes.

nodeJsCloud is about to launch a cloud hosting service for node.js developers. node.js is a JavaScript framework for building server-side applications. It's one of the hottest development platforms in use, with an explosion of interest since its introduction in early 2009. If you want to know more about node.js and why it's so hot, read our article Why Developers Should Pay Attention to Node.js.

nodeJsCloud is the brain child of developer Cliff Moon (Update: Justin Keller of nodeJsCloud contacted us to clarify that Cliff Moon is not a part of the company) and will compete with Nodejitsu, an existing node.js hosting platform now in private beta.

sprite.js is an open source framework for working with JavaScript sprites more efficiently.

The library provides two rendering backends: HTML and Canvas. The HTML version, which displays sprites using DOM elements, is used by default because the Canvas backend is slower when running on Firefox, Opera and Chrome. According to the project's notes on Github, "Canvas seems faster when there is a lot of transformations applied to the sprite."

JavaScript has never been hotter, thanks to projects like Node.js, JQuery and PhoneGap. You can now use JavaScript for scripting in the browser, for creating desktop and mobile applications, and for creating server side web applications. But how do you get started? We've compiled a list of six free books and tutorials for beginning programmers, but those with programming experience may find some of these resources valuable as well. Feel free to add more free resources in the comments.

As you probably know, Google recently rolled out its Instant Previews feature. The new feature involves quite a lot of client-side JavaScript, yet doesn't slow the search engine down for most of us. The Google Code Blog has a post on how the development team managed to add the new feature without noticeably impacting performance.

Jupiter Consulting, a development outfit and the creators of the JavaScriptMVC framework, has posted a guide on organizing jQuery applications with JavaScriptMVC 3.0. Justin Meyer, the author of the post, felt that other guides to organizing jQuery applications failed to emphasize a crucial aspect: breaking up applications into separate and testable components. "The secret to building large apps is NEVER build large apps," Meyer writes. " Break up your applications into small pieces. Then, assemble those testable, bite-sized pieces into your big application." Meyer looks at Srchr as an example.

"One of the secrets to being a super effective JavaScript developer is to truly understand the semantics of the language," writes developer Tim Caswell. That's why he's created a series of JavaScript lessons based on diagrams, each one illustrating a piece of example code. Caswell's lessons aren't geared towards new programmers. Those with no experience would be better served looking towards an introductory book on programming (or at least this tutorial) to learn the terminology and basic concepts. However, those wanting a deeper understanding of the JavaScript language will be well served by Caswell's tutorials. "My hope is that this helps those of us that are visual learners to get a better grasp of JavaScript semantics," he writes.

Yahoo! developer Tom Hughes-Croucher has released a free preview of his forthcoming O'Reilly Media book Up and Running With Node.js. The preview consists of the first approximately 20 pages of the book in PDF form.

Web frameworks, lead by the rise of Ruby on Rails, have been a hot topic in development for the past few years. Is it possible for them to be on the way to extinction already? A post on the blog of web development company Recursivity asks whether serverside web frameworks are becoming irrelevant. It's probably premature to ask whether it's already happening. But I think it's reasonable to ask whether they could be irrelevant and what it would take to make that happen.

Chinese coder Liu Liu has released the code for a JavaScript based face detector. There is a demo here and the code is available from Github. It appears to be a proof of concept at the moment, but could have more significant uses.