Sleek JavaScript Library Solves Your Dating Woes
It’s not often that we run across a JavaScript library that’s cool enough to warrant a post, but Datejs really is that cool. Datejs is a simple, fast and very powerful way to add a date picker to your site that accepts all sorts of relative date strings and turns them into standardized date objects.
When most of us encounter a date field on a page we’re accustomed to think in some sort of slash notation, i.e. 11/29/07 if you’re in the U.S or Canada and 29/11/07 if you’re pretty much anywhere else. But slash notation needn’t be the only option, using Datejs your visitors could just as easily type in “tomorrow” or “last November” and Datejs will translate that string into a date format you can pass through for server side processing.
Datejs isn’t perfect, but its a beta release so we expect that authors will clean up some of the edge cases as time progresses. If you’re one of those people that really enjoys seeing free, open source software libraries choke, type in “the day after tomorrow” to get your jollies.
Similar tools include Simon Willison’s “better way of entering dates,” but Datejs trumps that and others with its speed and internationalization features.
PHP programmers have the incredibly handy strtotime which handles a variety of string inputs on the server side, so they might not as enthused about Datejs, but for the rest of us, this provides a simple way to give your visitors a near infinite range of date input options and all it takes is adding a single line of code to your page.
Plus the site has a great ninja logo, what more do you want?
[via Ajaxian]
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