Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

BoardJS is a JavaScript library that simplifies the way of making interactive presentations, stories and ads.

The library works by writing commands such as adding texts, images, moving objects and showing tooltips, and once the .go() function is called, commands will be executed one by one.

The list of commands will be interpreted in the library as a timeline.

If you are familiar with animations in Microsoft Office, you will notice that BoardJS is the a bit the same but for developers and more interaction.

The benefits and features of the library are:

• Optimized and fast
• Cross browser and platform
• Changes the presentation without refreshing the page
• Applies commands to more than one object at a time
• Easy to update presentations
• Uses only HTML, JavaScript and CSS
• You can add multiple shows in the same page.

Take a look at the examples in the BoardJS’s site. If you get familiar with commands, any presentation should take about 30 minutes to finish the code. What will take your time is thinking about the presentation and preparing its content. Now, let’s make an example to make the image clear. (more…)

Toolbar.js allows you to quickly create tooltip style toolbars for use in web applications and websites. The toolbar is easily customisable using the twitter bootstrap icons and provides flexability around the toolbars display and number of icons.

Toolbars can be attached to any element required. You can run as many toolbars as required. Toolbars are responsive and follow the element on resize. The implementation is pretty straightforward with simple options. It is released under MIT License.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Download Link: http://paulkinzett.github.com/toolbar/
License: MIT License

Top Drawer is a smooth dropdown menu for responsive web design. It is designed to demonstrate smoother reveal menus in small contexts using CSS3 rather than animating with JavaScript.

Tap the menu icon in the top right. The click event will assign the class of active to the drawer container which alters the translate value to bring it into view. Modernizr will detect whether the user’s device is capable of CSS transforms, if it isn’t we simply show and hide the menu after the button is pressed – no point in animating if it isn’t going to work smoothly.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Download Link: http://www.jordanm.co.uk/lab/topdrawer
License: License Free

Kandan is an open source slick chat app for web developers. It is easy deploy to CloudFoundry, Heroku, dotCloud, etc. It supports Collaborative team chat, Unlimited channels, Embed formats for images and youtube videos with requests for others.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://kandan.me/
License: AGPL License

Opentip is a free opensource Java-Script tooltip class. There are great styles built right into opentip and it’s easy to create your own. Opentips can automatically download their contents via AJAX. It’s extremely easy to configure them to do so.

Joints and targets allow you to position the tooltip exactly where you want it. Stems are those little pointers. You can configure them to point in any direction. Opentips are drawn on canvas which creates beautifully rendered tooltips in all browsers. Opentip has been developed for and tested in all major browser, including IE7+.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Download Link: http://www.opentip.org/
License: MIT License

Dropzone.js is an open source library that provides drag’n’drop file uploads by simply including a java-script file. It views previews of images and you can register to different events to control how and which files are uploaded.

It supports Chrome 7+, Firefox 4+, IE 10+, Opera 12+ and Safari 5+. For all the other browsers, dropzone provides an oldschool file input fallback. It is released under MIT License.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Download Link: http://www.dropzonejs.com/
License: MIT License

Charts are a great visual aid when presenting data. You can’t build a professional admin panel without them. They are also tricky to set up. However, there is a new library that makes things easier – xCharts.

TutorialZine has published an article: Make Pretty Charts for Your App with jQuery and xCharts, that used xCharts along with the daterange picker for Twitter Bootstrap, to build a pretty, AJAX-powered chart for your web application that fetches data from a MySQL table.

Requirements: JavaScript and MySQL
Download Link: http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2013/01/charts-jquery-ajax/
License: License Free

Image Picker is a simple jQuery plugin that transforms a select element into a more user friendly graphical interface. It works great on both single and multiple select elements. It falls back nicely for clients without JavaScript enabled. It also integrates nicely with Twitter’s Bootstrap markup.

Simply add the attribute data-img-src with the url of the image you want to use as a preview. Image Picker does not resize or order your images in any way, there are better tools for it if you need it. It can look great if your images are properly designed and ordered.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Download Link: http://rvera.github.com/image-picker/
License: License Free

Springy is a force directed graph layout algorithm. It means that springy uses some real world physics to try and figure out how to show a network graph in a way that looks good.

Springy.js is designed to be small and simple. It provides an abstraction for graph manipulation and for calculating the layout and not too much else. The details of drawing and interaction are mostly up to you. This means you can use canvas, SVG, WebGL, or even just plain old positioned HTML elements.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Download Link: http://getspringy.com/
License: MIT License