Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

FnordMetric is a highly configurable (and pretty fast) realtime app/event tracking dashboard based on ruby eventmachine and redis. You define your own plotting and counting functions as ruby blocks.

FnordMetric gives you a live dashboard, that shows who is using your app in realtime. You can select a single user and follow them step by step as well. Best of all, it’s free for download and you can install it on your own server.

Requirements: -
Demo: https://github.com/paulasmuth/fnordmetric
License: License Free

jQuery Knob is powerful jQuery plugin that helps users to create beautiful circular switches like volume controls. It works by transforming any given input fields according to the values defined in its attributes and can be drag-and-dropped to change the value.

It also facilitates users to define the min-max values, default value on initial load, color and put it into read only mode. It supports touch, mousewheel and keyboard events. It is released under GPL and MIT license.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://anthonyterrien.com/knob/
License: MIT, GPL License

Crossfilter is a JavaScript library for exploring large multivariate datasets in the browser. Crossfilter supports extremely fast (<30ms) interaction with coordinated views, even with datasets containing a million or more records; it was built to power analytics for Square Register, allowing merchants to slice and dice their payment history fluidly.

Since most interactions only involve a single dimension, and then only small adjustments are made to the filter values, incremental filtering and reducing is significantly faster than starting from scratch. Crossfilter uses sorted indexes (and a few bit-twiddling hacks) to make this possible, dramatically increasing the perfor­mance of live histograms and top-K lists.

Requirements: D3
Demo: http://square.github.com/crossfilter/
License: Apache License 2.0

Faye is a publish-subscribe messaging system based on the Bayeux protocol. It provides message servers for Node.js and Ruby, and clients for use on the server and in all major web browsers.

It also includes a solid set of tools for easily building plain WebSocket servers and clients, compatible with a wide range of protocol versions. The latest version is 0.8.2, released April 12 2012. It is open-source software, released under the MIT license. You can follow development on Faye’s GitHub page.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://faye.jcoglan.com/
License: MIT License

PremiumPixels has just released an uber handsome set of 41 Free Social Media Icons in both 16px and 32px in PNG format by Prekesh Chavda. We all love social media icons, no matter how many sets we have already got.

They are pretty useful if you would like to integrate some of the most popular social media sites to your site. And it includes the fast-growing Pinterest icon as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.premiumpixels.com/freebies/41-social-media-icons-png/
License: License Free

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It is a lightweight approach to building HTML5 applications with emphasis on elegance and simplicity. It’s agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

To simplify app development, brunch watches your files for changes and automatically wraps your scripts and templates in require.js modules. All build errors are printed to console. If you have growl / libnotify, brunch will use them too.

There are some people who are using brunch already. Ranging from internal tooling to high traffic facebook apps. Feel free to check out the examples they mentioned on the website.

Requirements: Node.js
Demo: http://brunch.io/
License: License Free

Countdowns can be a great way to build up anticipation when launching a new website or web application, it gives users a clear indication of how long they need to wait before they can get access to your site.

jQuery Countdown is a handy and pretty jquery countdown plugin for you. You can easily customize the format, images, width and height. And it’s only 1.7 KB. Best of all, it’s released under Apache License 2.0 which is free for download.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://jquery-countdown.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html
License: Apache License 2.0

Fixie.js is an open source tool that automatically adds filler content to HTML documents. When designing and developing websites, it’s often useful to add lorem ipsum text to see what your page will look like without worrying about your final content. Unfortunately, adding lots of filler content involves lots of copy-pasting and manual editing, and also makes your HTML unwieldy.

Fixie.js makes filler content succinct, making it faster and easier to test out your designs. By interpreting your semantic HTML5 tags, Fixie will automagically add the right type of content in the right places. Headings, paragraphs, links, images, sections.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Demo: http://fixiejs.com/
License: License Free

First of all, thank you very much for all of your opinions and suggestions about the redesign. You guys have pointed out some of the most important things I missed when designing. Most of them are very useful and helped me improved the new design dramatically.

Sticky Navigation Menu No Longer Sticky

I have now set the navigation menu on the left hand side to be fixed position. A little Up Arrow button will be appeared when you scroll, so that you can quickly go to the top of the page if needed.

#05-12-2012 Update
The Navigation Menu is now sticky again, but used simple CSS: Fixed Postion instead. So it still follows your scroll but in a smooth way.

Content Area is Bigger than Ever

The content area is bigger for larger screens now. I have set the font size bigger, so it makes the content area more stand out. I have also made the sidebar background a bit darker, so that it won’t distract you from reading the content.

Better Contrast

The color of headings and titles are changed. It makes better contrast for them with the text of the content. And it’s more comfortable reading the text now. The links are now more obvious and visible too.

CSS Image Sprites

This should be the biggest mistake I have made. Preloading images for mouseover images on navigation menu did not work very well apparently. I have used CSS Image Sprites for mouseover images for navigation menu and most popular section now.

Still Responsive

It’s still a responsive design. You can always test it out in browser with different resolutions: 1280px, 1024px, 800px, 600px and 320px.

There are other bits and pieces I have made changes. Added the small indication for sub menus and etc.