The year of apocalypse is about to finish. Nothing happened. It was a good year for JavaScript, though. Many amazing projects were started this year. In this post we will go through a collection of the most popular ones based on their GitHub starrings.

All these libraries are different, but notable on their own. The true leader of list is Meteor. They received over 6500 stars on GitHub and over $11 Million investment from Andreessen Horowitz. That makes Meteor the promising project in upcoming 2013. Or maybe a most overestimated one? What do you think?

Most of the projects picked on our list focus on UI improvements. Examples of these include alerts and notifiers. One curious case is Yeoman. It aims to make JavaScript development by wrapping together various tools and enables developers to generate a scaffolding for their own projects.

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Meteor

Meteor is an open-source platform for building top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time, whether you're an expert developer or just getting started.

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Select2

Select2 is a jQuery based replacement for select boxes. It supports searching, remote data sets, and infinite scrolling of results. Look and feel of Select2 is based on the excellent Chosen library.

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Hammer.js

Hammer.js is a javascript library that can be used to control gestures on touch devices. It supports the following gestures: Tap Double tap Hold Drag Swipe Transform (pinch)

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Turn.js

Turn.js is a JavaScript library that will make your content look like a real book or magazine using all the advantages of HTML5. The web is getting beautiful with new user interfaces based in HTML5; turn.js is the best fit for a magazine, book or catalog based in HTML5.

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Mousetrap

Mousetrap is a simple library for handling keyboard shortcuts in Javascript. It is around 1.7kb minified and gzipped and 3kb minified, has no external dependencies, and has been tested in the following browsers: Internet Explorer 6+ Safari Firefox Chrome It has support for keypress, keydown, and keyup events on specific keys, keyboard combinations, or key sequences.

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Tinycon

A small library for manipulating the favicon Tinycon allows the addition of alert bubbles and changing the favicon image. Tinycon gracefully falls back to a number in title approach for browsers that don't support canvas or dynamic favicons. Alerts in the favicon allow users to pin a tab and easily see if their attention is needed.

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Yeoman

Yeoman (n) 1. A noble servant, carrying out various duties for the sovereign. Associated with hard toil. 2. Your new favorite web application stack and development tool.

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noty

noty is a jQuery plugin that makes it easy to create alert - success - error - warning - information - confirmation messages as an alternative the standard alert dialog. Each notification is added to a queue. (Optional)

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a!ertifyjs

An unobtrusive customizable JavaScript notification system

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morris.js

Making good-looking graphs shouldn't be hard. Morris.js is a lightweight library that uses jQuery and Raphaël to make drawing simple charts easy.

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MetroUI

Metro UI CSS allows to create a Web site in the style of Windows 8 quickly and without distractions on routine tasks.

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Gridster.js

Gridster is a jQuery plugin that allows building intuitive draggable layouts from elements spanning multiple columns. You can even dynamically add and remove elements from the grid. It is on par with sliced bread, or possibly better. MIT licensed. Suitable for children of all ages.

This was an awesome year for us web developers. Plenty of new technologies appeared and the pace doesn't seem to be slowing down. On the contrary. This site, Jster, was launched back in October. We are the most complete catalog for JavaScript frontend development. In the next year we plan to evolve, go well beyond 1000 JavaScript libraries in our catalog. Besides extending the catalog, we will improve the service continuously and make it serve your needs better. Happy New Post-Apocalyptic Year and Merry X-Mas!