Is there a general purpose JavaScript library out there?

Question

We started a new project and realized that we needed a general purpose javascript library that contains a nice set of string functions, MD5, base64, allows extensions, etc. Also, copying and pasting functions from other libraries doesn't sound very attractive.

So, I guess the question is which javascript library contains the most general purpose functionality out there? or maybe there is a good collection of global functions out there we could use/extend. We know DOM manipulation is covered by many AJAX libraries including JQuery.

*Mind you, we could alternatively extend ExtJS, JQuery, etc. Is that what you guys are doing?

Answer 1

Google Closure Library

It contains (quoted from link):

a large set of reusable UI widgets and controls, and from lower-level utilities for DOM manipulation, server communication, animation, data structures, unit testing, rich-text editing, and more.

It also contains a nice set of string manipulating methods, in goog.string namespace.

Underscore

Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides a lot of the functional programming support that you would expect in Prototype.js

Underscore is intended to go along with other library, like jQuery or prototype. It's not extensible like jQuery or Google Closure, though.