Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Facebook Connect is way to make your application more social. With it you gain access to: Identity: the user’s name, photo and more. Social Graph: the user’s friends and connections. Distribution: the Stream, and the ability to communicate. Integration: publishers, canvas pages, profile boxes & tabs.

This guide is for using the Mu JavaScript library to access the above on your site. Mu is a very lightweight library which you can use Facebook Connect on your site along with your favourite JavaScript library such as Dojo, jQuery, MooTools, Prototype or YUI.

Requirements: Facebook Connect
Demo: http://mu.daaku.org/console/
License: License Free

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CSScaffold is a CSS framework written in PHP. Rather than try and create a static framework that uses the standard abilities of CSS, like Blueprint, it uses PHP to extend CSS. The syntax looks and feels exactly like CSS, except that you have some new, powerful abilities.

The best part is that all of this is done transparently. You can drop Scaffold into your site and you’ll instantly have access to all of its functionality. Scaffold requires a web server with PHP 5+. Mod_rewrite for Apache is required if you want it work automatically route your css files through Scaffold.

Requirements: PHP 5+
Demo: http://github.com/anthonyshort/csscaffold
License: New BSD License

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Most of us create identities across the web without much conscious thought. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews, and bookmarks. Although this information is often public, it’s fragmented into the silos of individual websites.

Glenn Jones built a JavaScript library that can help you do just that. Ident Engine discovers and retrieves distributed identities and profiles from across the web. Simply enter your profile URLs, you would be shocked by the level of detail it found out about you. You can also find out how Ident Engine works on A List Apart: Discovering Magic as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://identengine.com/
License: MIT License

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SWFAddress is a small, but powerful library that provides deep linking for Flash and Ajax. It’s a developer tool, allowing creation of unique virtual URLs that can point to a website section or an application state.

SWFAddress enables a number of important capabilities which are missing in today’s rich web technologies including: Bookmarking in a browser or social website. Sending links via email or instant messenger.

It also enables finding specific content with the major search engines. And utilizing browser history and reload buttons.

It has been tested on Internet Explorer 6.0+, Mozilla Firefox 1.0+, Safari 1.3+, Opera 9.5+, Chrome 1.0+ and Camino 1.0+.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/
License: MIT License

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CSSHttpRequest is cross-domain Ajax using CSS. Like JavaScript includes, this works because CSS is not subject to the same-origin policy that affects XMLHttpRequest. CSSHttpRequest functions similarly to JSONP, and is limited to making GET requests. Unlike JSONP, untrusted third-party JavaScript cannot execute in the context of the calling page.

  CSSHttpRequest.get(
        "http://www.nb.io/hacks/csshttprequest/hello-world/",
        function(response) { alert(response); }
    );

Data is encoded on the server into URI-encoded 2KB chunks and serialized into CSS rules with a modified data: URI scheme. The selector should be in the form #c<N>, where N is an integer index in [0,]. The response is decoded and returned to the callback function as a string:

    #c0 { background: url(data:,Hello%20World!); }
    #c1 { background: url(data:,I’m%20text%20encoded%20in%20CSS!); }
    #c2 { background: url(data:,I%20like%20arts%20and%20crafts.); }

CSSHttpRequest is open source under an Apache License (Version 2.0).

Requirements: IE6+, Firefox 2+, Safari 3+, iPhone
Demo: http://nb.io/hacks/csshttprequest
License: Apache License

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The Symfony Components are standalone and reusable PHP classes. With no pre-requisite, except for PHP, you can install them today, and start using them right away. Currently, there are three components available at the moment.

YAML – A PHP library that speaks YAML
Symfony YAML is a PHP library that parses YAML strings and converts them to PHP arrays. It can also converts PHP arrays to YAML strings.

Event Dispatcher – Facilitating communication between PHP classes
Symfony Event Dispatcher is a PHP library that provides a lightweight implementation of the Observer design pattern.

Dependency Injection – Reinventing how you manage PHP classes
Symfony Dependency Injection is a PHP library that provides a robust Dependency Injection Container.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://components.symfony-project.org/
License: MIT License

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Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google’s webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

The framework is distinct from most mainstream web server frameworks because it is non-blocking and reasonably fast. Because it is non-blocking and uses epoll, it can handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections, which means it is ideal for real-time web services.

They built the web server Tornado specifically to handle FriendFeed’s real-time features — every active user of FriendFeed maintains an open connection to the FriendFeed servers.

Requirements: PycURL and a JSON library like simplejson installed
Demo: http://www.tornadoweb.org/
License: Apache 2.0 License

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jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on forward-thinking devices. You can create powerful mobile apps with just HTML, CSS, and jQuery. It supports native animations, automatic navigation, and themes for mobile WebKit browsers like iPhone, G1, and Pre.

jQTouch requires one basic theme to make page transitions work which is very small. One could use just the core CSS file to build a completely custom UI. Themes are additional CSS files which provide native-looking styles, mostly centered around the iPhone OS. Themes included are: Apple, jQT and Vanilla.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://jqtouch.com/
License: MIT License

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Baseline is a framework built around the idea of a “real” baseline grid. Built with typographic standards in mind, Baseline makes it easy to develop a website with a pleasing grid and good typography.

Baseline starts with several files to reset the browser’s default behavior, build a basic typographic layout — including style for HTML forms and new HTML 5 elements — and build a simple grid system. Baseline was born to be a quick way to prototype a website and grew up to become a full typographic framework for the web using “real” baseline grid as it’s foundation.

Baseline is free and will always be free, it is a way to give back to the web community and promote better typography. It is licenses under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://baselinecss.com/
License: Creative Commons License

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Picok stands for Personal Information Cockpit. It’s an open source software package, aimed at enabling users to build their personal information dashboards. The users content is loaded into small draggable boxes, so called portlets, and layed out in a tabbed column-based interface. There are a quite few standard portlets shipped with Picok, but since it is an open system, maintainers of picok installations can easily create portlets of their own.

Picok is written in PHP 5, uses the Yahoo User Interface Library and Zend Framework Components and supports MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM Lotus Notes and is ready to be integrated into your corporate intranet, website or community platform as well.

Requirements: Yahoo User Interface Library
Demo: http://www.picok.org/en/
License: GPL 3.0 License

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