Analytics and Business Intelligence are rapidly becoming essential component of business applications. Whether the purpose is to visualize data, monitor trends or forecast business conditions, visualizing data in an easy way to represent digits and binaries into a presentable and understandable format.

There are a number of data visualization tools discussed on this blog already. Today we are featuring Cube, which is an open-source system for visualizing time series data. Built on MongoDB, Node and D3, Cube is easy to implement in any web application.

Cube is generic in nature and not specific to any particular business domain. It receives timestamped events (with optional structured data), that can be easily converted to realtime visualizations. For example, you might use Cube to monitor traffic to your website, counting the number of requests in 5-minute intervals.

Guys at Browserling have open-sourced 90 Node.js modules! That’s right! 90 Node.js modules. All written from scratch.

They published a list of all open source Node.js modules together with their brief descriptions. All of them are greatly documented so just click the ones you’re interested in to read more and see examples.

FitVids.JS is a lightweight, easy-to-use jQuery plugin for embedding fluid width videos.

This jQuery video plugin is easily configurable, simply include jQuery and FitVids.js in your layout and target your videos container with fitVids(). This will wrap each video in a div.fluid-width-video-wrapper and apply the necessary CSS. After the initial Javascript call, it’s all percentage-based CSS magic.

It currently supports:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Blip.tv
• Viddler
• Kickstarter

A pre-processor is a tool for interpreting CSS before sending out to the client. This means that the developer can add CSS in a more complex syntax, and then send it to the pre-processor to convert it into standard CSS code.

CSS Crush is a PHP based CSS pre-processor that automagically handles vendor prefixes, CSS variables, data-uris, minification and much more.

It aims to alleviate many of the hacks and workarounds necessary in modern CSS development.

ExColor is a Free jQuery color picker plugin to select colors from a Photoshop-like color picker.

Can be appended to form input text fields and allow the user to choose his desired color, instead of entering the color code.

A custom color picker skin creator (wizard) is also available to customize as per your needs.

FlyJSONP is a small JavaScript library that allows you to do cross-domain GET and POST requests with remote services that support JSONP, and get a JSON response.

By using the YQL service, FlyJSONP has a small footprint and no dependencies.

Major Features

• Cross-domain GET & POST requests with JSON response
• Control over the callback parameter name for GET requests
• No other dependency on other JavaScript frameworks

TransformJS is a jQuery plugin which exposes new CSS properties accessible through .css() and .animate() which you can use to apply and manage transformations to a jQuery element.

TransformJS uses feature detection to analyze the supported features of the browser it is running in and adapts accordingly and it maintains an in-memory matrix which it uses to apply the transforms.

The ability to use transforms without constructing huge stylesheets for x-browser compatability is nice.

Recurly.js is an open source JavaScript library which allows you to easily embed a PCI compliant order form within your website.

This JavaScript library is designed to be easily embedded and customized to match your website. The library performs in-line validation, real-time total calculations, and gracefully handles errors.

Your customer stays on your website while their billing information is securely sent to Recurly for approval. Because the cardholder data is sent directly to Recurly, your PCI compliance scope is dramatically reduced.

Should a transaction be declined, the library automatically highlights the appropriate fields and displays proper error messages for your customers.

Mobilize.js is an HTML5 framework to do website mobilization on the client side. It detects mobile browser and convert the website for touch optimized displays using jQuery Mobile UI framework.

• Automatically detect mobile browsers
• One script tag integration
• Touch optimized user interface based on jQuery Mobile
• Cloud hosting: optimized JS and CSS from the cloud
• Supports iPhone, Android and many other browsers & devices

The client orientation and lack of complex server-side dependencies makes Mobilize.js simple and easy to integrate to any web system.

Spin.js is an open source JavaScript Progress Indicator with VML fallback for IE. The progress indicator is highly configurable and you can control the number of lines, length, width, radius etc using an easy to use interface completely built with CSS3.

Features

• No images, no external CSS
• No dependencies
• Highly configurable
• Resolution independent
• Works in all major browsers, including IE6
• Smaller than an animated GIF (2.85Kb minified, 1.6Kb gzipped)