Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

PHP/SWF Charts is a simple, yet powerful PHP tool to create attractive web charts and graphs from dynamic data. Use PHP scripts to generate or gather the data from databases, then pass it to this tool to generate Flash (swf) charts and graphs. PHP/SWF Charts makes the best of both the PHP and SWF worlds. PHP scripts provide integration, and Flash provides the best graphic quality. It supports many charts types, Line, Column, Stacked column, Floating column, 3D column, Stacked 3D column, Parallel 3D column, Pie, 3D Pie, Bar, Stacked bar, Floating bar, Area, Stacked area, Candlestick, Scatter, Polar, Mixed, Composite and Joined. Can you ask for more? They have the following main features.

• Web charts and graphs from dynamic data
• Live and interactive chart updates without reloading the web page
• Clickable charts, and drill-down
• Animated transitions
• Printable charts
• Simple and flexible chart generation

PHP/SWF Charts is free to download and use. The free, unregistered version contains all the features except for:

1. Clicking a chart takes the user to the PHP/SWF Charts web site
2. No displaying charts inside another flash file
3. No technical support, and no product updates by e-mail

Requirements: Flash Player 6+, Server with PHP Support
Demo: http://www.maani.us/charts/index.php?menu=Gallery
License: License Free

• 8 Comments

Another great Addon for Ext Framework again. Ext File Upload Form Widget is to provide an user interface for easy uploading of files to a server.

Files are first added to an “upload queue” and then they are uploaded to the server. Any file can be individually removed from the queue before upload or the whole queue can be cleared.

The result of upload is shown for each file by icons of success or failure and, in the case of failure, the server error message is shown as the tooltip of the failure icon.

Requirements: Ext Framework
Demo: http://aariadne.com/uploadform/
License: LGPL License

• 6 Comments

Other than Google Adsense, Banner Ads and Text Link Ads, we have another way to advertise and monetize our website very soon. Youtube has just started video advertising solution, now you can run your own video advertising soon.

For Advertisers, LiveRail is a unique online video advertising platform that lets you promote your business with measurable results and predictable costs, by only paying when someone chooses to watch your ad.

For Publishers, LiveRail can help you distribute your video content online and monetize it without signing away your copyrights. By publishing your video through LiveRail serve your video back exclusively to your own website, covering all your bandwidth costs, along with highly targeted, relevant and unobtrusive advertising, that your viewers only need to watch when it interests them.

Advertisers can see a full list of their active campaigns, with breakdowns on their views, click throughs and spending.

Advertiser’s commercials are encoded in Flash-video format, and include descripions and links to the advertiser’s website. If you want to find out more about how LiveRail works, you can request an invitation and start using the system.

• 1 Comment

Democracy Ajax Poll is a WordPress plugin which adds polling functionality to your WordPress blog. It grew out of frustration with the only other WordPress polling option, WP-poll. It didn’t have valid markup, it was clunky, and it required one heck of an installation process.

This plugin uses Ajax for quick sending and loading of poll data, although it doesn’t depend on javascript to function. It is fully functional in non-javascript environments, meaning it will work in ALL browsers. The Ajax part is tested to work in Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE6/Win.

Democracy Ajax Poll also has a full-featured admin panel, which allows one to manage their polls. You can activate, edit, delete, and add new polls from the admin panel. It uses cookies as well as IP logging to prevent users from working spamming the ballot box. It is good looking and also allows in-post polling. The most important point is that there is no linkback of author on the poll, so it looks like it is really your own poll which is better than PollDaddy polls.

Requirements: WordPress 2.0 or Greater
Demo: http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy
License: GPL License

• 3 Comments

I think many people are familiar with PollDaddy which is an online tool, which allows you to create free polls and place them on your website, blog, MySpace, hi5, Friendster or Xanga account or anywhere online.

PollDaddy is simple and flexible, allowing you to customize our styles to match your website or email campaign. Deliver your poll through JavaScript, flash, direct link, widget or RSS to survey your user’s opinions.

It looks really nice as well. You can choose different themes for your polls. The only drawback is that there is a PollDaddy.com link on your polls.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.polldaddy.com
License: License Free

• 1 Comment

Code Central has shown us how easily one can create a lightbox using YUI’s Dialog class. The lightbox incorporated many new features, along with old features such as drop and drag, it has an image preloader, it can scale large images to fit the window, it has a maximum button that allows you to inflate scaled images. You can even double click on the title bar to switch between maximized and scaled mode (for images that are larger than browser’s window area). You can also hide the lightbox conveniently by clicking on the image.

Requirements: Firefox 2+, Netscape 8+, IE 6+, Opera 9+
Demo: http://test.thecodecentral.com/demos/lightboxrev/lightbox.html
License: License Free

• 1 Comment

You can create screenshots and screencasts easily for your web application easily now. Jing sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content on your clipboard ready for you to paste the URL into any of your conversations. Your content is hosted on Screencast.com, for which they are providing a complimentary account to all participants during this project. Users have 200MB of space for storing screenshots and screencasts and 1 GB of bandwidth that renews monthly. The Screencast.com account will remain available to you for the duration of the project.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.jingproject.com/
License: License Free

• 5 Comments

Sweet Titles Fading Tooptips is not a knock-off from NICE Titles nor is it trying to improve on Dunstan’s revised attempt. And it most definitely isn’t ripped from one of those event-handler infested scripts from Dynamic Drive . No. It’s none of those. Instead he had two goals for this script.

1. Make the code cleaner and much more condense – with in fact – less code
2. Improve the tooltip effect

Cool notable feature that Sweet Titles (as well as Nice Titles) has is that the JavaScript is unobtrusive which of course as we all know, in and of itself, improves accessibility. Another thing I like about Sweet Titles is the appearance of the tooltips, it looks very nice.

Requirements: Modern Browsers with Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://www.dustindiaz.com/sweet-titles/
License: Creative Commons License

• 3 Comments

LinkWorth is one of the web’s largest and most innovative marketing portals that caters to both Advertisers and Partners. Their products consist of text link ads, paid blog reviews, in-text links, in-content pay per click ads, rotating text ads, hosted content pages, article submission, directory submission and many more. LinkWorth today is a steadily growing community housing thousands of partner website listings and advertisers ranging from the smallest of online companies to Fortune 500 companies like HP.

For Advertisers

• Buy ads and increase traffic, visibility and search positions
• SEO/SEM Consulting, Reputation Management
• Article Distribution, Directory Submission, Press Releases, Custom Content & more
• Huge inventory of publishers growing daily
• Perfect backend for Agencies to White Label or Add-on to existing services
• Use Control Center to manage one or all of your accounts with one login

For Partners:

• Sell ads and monetize your site with relatively little maintenance
• Earn up to 70% of ad revenue recurring monthly in most situations
• Get paid to blog and write reviews for products & services
• Tons of advertisers, from Fortune 500 to small businesses
• The more websites you list, the more money you earn
• Manage all of your published ads and websites with Control Center

*** LinkWorth has no longer have the bad design and confusing navigation in the Control Center anymore. They have just released the new design of Control Center today. I am impressed with the new great design.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: Sign up Now
License: N/A

• 0 Comments

Prototip allows you to easily create both simple and complex tooltips using the Prototype javascript framework. If you also use Scriptaculous you can even add some nice effects to them as well. You can easily create fixed or offset tooltips with blinding or fade in/out effect. You can also define Hooking for the tooltips which allows you to place your tooltips anywhere in relation to your target elements. The concept is simple, you define two corners that you want to ‘hook’ to eachother. One on the target element, the other one on the tooltip. It is licensed under Creative Commons, feel free to use it on your projects.

Requirements: Prototype Framework
Demo: http://www.nickstakenburg.com/projects/prototip/
License: Creative Commons License

• 7 Comments