Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

PHP Excel Reader allows you to parse and retrieve information from XLS files. It reads the binary format of XLS files directly and can return values and formats from any cell.

The simplest way to interact with an XLS file is to just dump it to HTML for display in a browser. This method will generate a table with inline CSS and all available formatting. By simply using this php command: <?php dump(true,true); ?> The output looks like this (with some CSS):

Requirements: PHP Framework
Demo: http://code.google.com/p/php-excel-reader/
License: MIT License

dhtmlxGantt is a JavaScript component that allows you to create dynamic Gantt chart and visualize a project schedule in a convenient graphical way. With dhtmlxGantt you can display dependency relationships between activities, show current schedule status with percent-complete shadings and organize the activities into a tree structure.

The component works in all major web-browsers, including IE, Mozilla, Opera, Chrome. You can initialize the chart from XML or through JavaScript API. All the changes made in the chart structure on a web page can be saved back to the server on the fly (in XML form) with a single function call.

Requirements: JavaScript Enabled
Demo: http://dhtmlx.com/docs/products/dhtmlxGantt/
License: GPL License

The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants.

Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph
License: License Free

In many blogs and news sites images are mostly included as an addition to the content. Space is often limited and therefore it would be a good idea to integrate a miniature image gallery that does not occupy a lot of space.

Micro Image Gallery jQuery plugin transforms a set of images into a tiny gallery with several options. It allows to switch between a grid view which shows a preview of the images as thumbnails and a single view showing one image only. The navigation bar can be hidden and sliding out when hovering over the gallery, or visible. A total of nine thumbnails are shown in the grid preview. The plugin will automatically resize the image according to the chosen gallery size.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/MicroGallery/
License: License Free

Thank you for all of the participants of Giveaway 3 x Professional Licenses of Formstack. We are happy to announce the following 3 winners. Congratulations. Formstack will contact you guys shortly with the instruction of getting your free 12 months subscriptions.

1. Justin DiMucci, 2. Marco, 3. Shaf

WebAppers will continue giving away some really nice web development tools and resources to our readers. Please feel free to suggest what you would like for the next Giveaway under this post. Thank you.

When we are designing E-Commerce sites, we usually need some payment icons. So that we can clearly tell our clients which payment methods we accept.

Web Icon Set is very kind to release a set of Payment Icon Set for free. Payment Icon Set includes VISA Card, Master Card, American Express, Cirrus, PayPal, Cash Payment, Gold Coin, Gold Coin Stacks, Secure Payment, Shopping Cart. They are free for both personal and commercial projects.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.webiconset.com/payment-icon-set/
License: License Free

Envato Marketplace has recently launched CodeCanyo. At CodeCanyon, you can purchase and sell scripts and components for a variety of languages and frameworks, currently including JavaScript, PHP, ASP.NET, and Java. Most of the items are at very low price.

Here we have collected the following 20 Really Useful Scripts & Components on CodeCanyon. You may find them useful when developing your own web applications. Please feel free to suggest some useful scripts you found somewhere else as well.

1. Living Form

This technique allows you to create unique forms that are guaranteed to impress your clients. You can choose multiple colors and adjust more than ten different variables to create your own effects. The possible combinations are infinite and there are no limits to the effects you can create.

2. ThumbsUp

ThumbsUp would be a nice addition to your website. It allows visitors to vote for anything you want. It ships with an admin interface and six different templates for you to choose from.

3. Advanced Backup System

This script is a must have for every webdeveloper/webmaster that want to save some time. Advanced Backup System or Abs helps you with tasks as backing up files, backing up databases and deploy new version to a server. (more…)

CSS Gallery is a “showroom” for the coolest website designs. From the designers perspective they can be used as an inspirations resource and from the submitter views, getting your web site published on CSS galleries will give you a possibility to increase visibility of your brand , make it visible to a lot of experts users and, of course, it means a lot of traffics.

With CSSGallerySubmission.com, you can submit your website to almost all of available CSS Galleries in the net, simply by using one single form, and the best part is that’s all 100% free of charge. However, you must do the submission process manually. CSSGallerySubmission.com are here just providing you a tool to help you doing the submission work faster and easily.

Source: http://www.cssgallerysubmission.com/

jSquares is a jQuery plugin that pops up an image and a description in an overlay on hover. It is basically identical to the image grid found on www.ted.com. There are some parameters can be added when you call jSquares, e.g. caption size, opacity of the images, shuffle speed and etc. It works like a charm in IE6+, FF 3+, Safari 3+ and Opera 10.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://boedesign.com/demos/jsquares/
License: MIT, GPL License