Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Cappuccino is an open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like the desktop software users are familiar with.

Cappuccino is built on top of standard web technologies like JavaScript, and it implements most of the familiar APIs from GNUstep and Apple’s Cocoa frameworks. When you program in Cappuccino, you don’t need to concern yourself with the complexities of traditional web technologies like HTML, CSS, or even the DOM. The unpleasantries of building complex cross browser applications are abstracted away for you.

Cappuccino was implemented using a new programming language called Objective-J, which is modelled after Objective-C and built entirely on top of JavaScript. Programs written in Objective-J are interpreted in the client, so no compilation or plugins are required.

Instead of doing all or most of the work on the server, Cappuccino applications do as much as possible in the client. A typical application would never reload, but rather send and recieve data using traditional AJAX techniques and then present that data in the client code.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://cappuccino.org/
License: LGPL License

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You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

Mozilla Labs has announced the launch of Ubiquity. Ubiquity empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) And it enables on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyubone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Ubiquity lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the  GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
License: GPL/MPL/LGPL Tri-License

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Phusion Passenger is an Apache module, which makes deploying Ruby and Ruby on Rails applications on Apache a breeze. It follows the usual Ruby on Rails conventions, such as “Don’t-Repeat-Yourself” and ease of setup, while at the same time providing enough flexibility.

Phusion Passenger is a commercial supported open source product that enables people to deploy their Ruby on Rails applications in an upload-and-go manner, which is very reminiscent of the PHP way of deploying. Also, you can always get community support on Discussion board.

Requirements: Any OS, except Microsoft Windows
Demo: http://www.modrails.com
License: GPL License

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The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, is developing Android which is the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. It is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications. This beta version of the Android SDK provides the tools and APIs necessary to begin developing applications on the Android platform using the Java programming language. They’re offering the Android Software Development Kit as well. There are four major features Android provides.

Open
Android allows you to access core mobile device functionality through standard API calls.

All applications are equal
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s basic and third-party applications, even the dialer or home screen can be replaced.

Breaking down boundaries
Combine information from the web with data on the phone, such as contacts or geographic location to create new user experiences.

Fast & easy development
The SDK contains what you need to build and run Android applications, including a true device emulator and advanced debugging tools.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://code.google.com/android/
License: Apache License 2.0

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The YUI team is pleased to announce the public availability of YUI 3.0 Preview Release 1, an early look at what they’re working on for the next generation of the YUI Library. Documentation for YUI 3.0 is on the YUI website; the download is available on the YUI project area on SourceForge;  Keep in mind that this is an early preview, not a production-quality (or even a beta) release. This release is not suitable for production use, but it will give you an idea of what they’re working on, and it should provide a good framework for conversation about the future of the library. They’ve set five design goals for the next generation of the library. What you’ve told us is that YUI 3.0 should be:

• lighter (less K-weight on the wire and on the page for most uses)
• faster (fewer http requests, less code to write and compile, more efficient code)
• more consistent (common naming, event signatures, and widget APIs throughout the library)
• more powerful (do more with less implementation code)
• more securable (safer and easier to expose to multiple developers working in the same environment)

Requirements: -
Demo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/
License: BSD License

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Meteora is set of cross-browser Widgets and Controls that allows you to quickly write rich and customizable web applications without having to waste time reading full pages of documentation or programming excessive javascript that is painful to debug in every browser.

Meteora is an Open Source project based on the great mootools framework and it’s released under the MIT license. Scripts that already work with mootools can be used with Meteora too. View the demo, you can see what it can do for us.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://meteora.astrata.com.mx/pages/demo
License: MIT License

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Would you like to develop a online learning system? Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It’s an ongoing development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License).

Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support a SQL type database (for example MySQL). It can be run on Windows and Mac operating systems and many flavors of linux (for example Red Hat or Debian GNU). You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 400,000 registered users on this site. Moodle is available in a variety of download packages with different levels of stability, as well as via CVS. A number of additional modules/plugins and language packs are also available.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://moodle.org/
License: GPL License

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Sava is an Open Source ColdFusion CMS. They’ve seen that the best tools are those built to match the people who use them, both in terms of function and anticipation of common problems. This approach is at the core of Sava, a tool built to make work easier, whether it’s something as simple as adding a news release or as complex as integrating data with an enterprise CRM.

Sava is designed to help you manage your site content easily, with as little hassle as possible. Sava’s got hundreds of built-in features that make this possible – here’s a quick look at the highlights:

Easy and fast content editing – Need to fix a typo or add a new page? It takes just a couple clicks, and you’re all set. Sava takes the pain out of content management.

World-class CSS Support – Sava makes life better for CSS designers and developers, with best-in-class CSS capabilities. It really is what you’ve been looking for…

Search Engine Friendly – With clean, well-formed page structures, SEO-friendly URLs, and full control over all page content and attributes, Sava is a great choice for SEO-focused websites.

Cross Platform Flexibility – ColdFusion? Java? Linux? Windows? Mac OSX? MySQL? Microsoft SQL Server? The answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!”

All features- Here’s an overview of all the Sava features in one, convenient look.

Requirements: ColdFusion MX7+ or Railo 2.0+
Demo: http://www.gosava.com/sava/
License: GPL 2 License

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jQuery UI 1.5 released with a new approach to UI. Using the “simple” approach, we were only able to serve simple interaction modules, but not full featured UI widgets. The second problem was that some plugins came from external sources making the UI suite seem disjointed and inconsistent. found an approach that kept the simplicity of jQuery while making it possible to add full featured widgets to UI. jQuery UI 1.5 is a generic API that allowed for maximum flexibility while being amazingly simple and it is simple to develop plugins for that API.

One of the first things that a user typically wants to do when using new UI controls is “skin” them to match their site’s color schemes. ThemeRoller offers a unique approach to theming UI components specifically built for jQuery UI. With ThemeRoller, you can create your very own theme for your project within minutes. It’s completely intuitive, comes wich rich controls to change the color and design of each state, and then previews your theme with the actual UI components as you work.

You now have literally millions of combinations to chose from. Any theme you create can be reached by copying the URL at any point in your progress; and after you’ve played with it enough, you can click the download button and a ZIP package is generated with the css file, the images and a demo page.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller
License: MIT and GPL License

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Yahoo! Design Stencil Kit version 1.0 is available for OmniGraffle, Visio (XML), Adobe Illustrator (PDF and SVG), and Adobe Photoshop (PNG), and covers the following topics:

I am sure you will find them useful when designing user interface for your website / web application. All of them are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/
License: Creative Commons 2.5 License

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