I found a jQuery plugin – jCarousel, it was everything I want. The example, I liked most was Carousel with external controls.

Here’re few tips how to integrate jCarousel in your website:

1. Reduce the number of javascript and css files

When you open the example page, in the head tag you can see  includes of 3 css files (style.css, jquery.jcarousel.css and skin.css), 2 js files (jquery-1.2.3.pack.js and jquery.jcarousel.pack.js), additional styles for the controls and some js code for initCallback callback. All of this css and js code can be moved in 2 files: 1 css and 1 js.

Note: when you move all code in one js file, it’s very important it to be moved in the same order as the included files. Also, when you move the content from jquery-1.2.3.pack.js, add ‘;‘ in the end of its content

2. Delete the images if they are not necessary

In the css file you can see classed that use images files. If you don’t need these files (ex. images for ‘prev’ and ‘next’), just delete them.

3. Remove the unnecessary code

In the css file there are too much classed that you wouldn’t need. Ex. if you use vertical position of your items list, you don’t need to keep classes for horizontal items list. Also, you could remove the unnecessary js code. Ex. I didn’t want to use prev and next buttons, so I delete all instances and code that uses buttonNextHTML, buttonPrevHTML, buttonNextEvent, buttonPrevEvent, buttonNextCallback, buttonPrevCallback.

4. clear the comments, too

You can see also a lot of comments in the js code. If we clear them, the code will work in the same way, but the file size will be less, which will allow it to be loaded by the visitor’s browsers faster So, I deleted all comments in code.

Instead of manual deleting of the comments you can use the Reduce Code Size Tool, it’ll remove all comments for you

I think jCarousel is a great jQuery plugin. But, if there’s a functionality that I don’t need for my purposes, I think it’s a good idea to remove it and to optimize the script loading to be faster

1. J3Unit – an object-oriented unit testing framework for JavaScript. It runs javascript tests in the web browser.

URL: http://j3unit.sourceforge.net/

2. JsUnit – another javascript unit testing framework in the browser. It includes a platform for automating execution of tests on multiple browsers.

URL: http://www.jsunit.net/

3. YUI 2 – a testing framework for browser-based JavaScript solutions.

Features:

• DOM Event simulation in all A-grade browsers.
• Grouping of related test cases using test suites.
• Rapid creation of test cases through simple syntax.
• Advanced failure detection for methods that throw errors.
• Asynchronous tests for testing events and Ajax communication.

URL: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/yuitest/

4. Crosscheck – an open source testing framework for verifying javascript in your browser. It helps you ensure that your js code will work fine under multiple browsers.

URL: http://thefrontside.net/crosscheck

5. JSLitmus – a lightweight tool for creating JavaScript benchmark tests. Features:

• one file for installation (JSLitmus.js)
• works on different browsers – Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE, Google Chrome, and iPhone browsers
• Google Chart + TinyUrl integration
• adaptive test cycles – tests take ~1-2 seconds, regardless of the operation
• Open Source

URL: http://broofa.com/Tools/JSLitmus/

6. Regular Expression Tool – easy to use online to that helps you to search for your regular expression matches in your text.

URL: http://erik.eae.net/playground/regexp/regexp.html

If you know another tools for testing and validating javascript code, I’ll be very thankful to post a link to it as a comment to include its info in the post