Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Batman.js is a framework for building rich single-page browser applications. It is written in CoffeeScript and its API is developed with CoffeeScript in mind, but of course you can use plain old JavaScript too.

It got a stateful MVC architecture, a powerful binding system, routable controller actions, pure HTML views, toolchain support built on node.js and cake. The APIs are heavily inspired by Rails and designed to make Rails devs feel right at home. It has been tested on Chrome, Safari 4+, Firefox 3+, and IE 7+ for compatibility.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://batmanjs.org/
License: MIT License

Ember.js is a JavaScript framework for creating ambitious web applications by eliminating boilerplate and providing a standard application architecture.

Ember.js, like some other modern JavaScript frameworks, works a little differently. Instead of the majority of your application’s logic living on the server, an Ember.js application downloads everything it needs to run in the initial page load. That means that while your user is using your app, she never has to load a new page and your UI responds quickly to their interaction.

One advantage of this architecture is that your web application uses the same REST API as your native apps or third-party clients. Back-end developers can focus on building a fast, reliable, and secure API server, and don’t have to be front-end experts, too.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Demo: http://www.emberjs.com/
License: License Free

Foundation is a rock-solid, responsive framework for rapidly prototyping and iterating into production code. It includes tons of great tools and elements that’ll get you up and running in no time.

Within global.css you’ll find The Grid, a layout framework that works on mobile devices, small screens and full-on modern desktops. It’s a twelve column, semi-liquid, mobile-scaling grid of awesomeness that you’re gonna love. It even supports arbitrary nesting.

Foundation includes dozens of styles and elements to help you quickly put together clickable prototypes, that can then be adapted and styled into polished production code. Forms, buttons, tabs, all kinds of good stuff. Foundation is MIT-licensed and absolutely free to use.

You should also look at Twitter Bootstrap Toolkit we mentioned earlier too. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and etc.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://foundation.zurb.com/
License: MIT License

It’s difficult to get consensus on how much or how little a framework should do. Flatiron is an unobtrusive framework initiative for node.js. No one agrees on frameworks. Flatiron’s approach is to package simple to use yet full featured components and let developers subtract or add what they want.

Flatiron promotes code organization and sustainability by clearly separating development concerns. Each component works elegantly with or without its counterparts. Many of the components work the same in the browser as they do on the server. This is the motivation behind flatiron.

Requirements: Node.js
Demo: http://flatironjs.org/
License: License Free

Animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. To use them in your project, simply add the class to the element, or call the animation yourself in your CSS file. The classes and the animations have the same name.

CSS animations are supported in Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft have also promised support for Internet Explorer 10, and support has been announced for Opera 12.

Animate.css is actually built to complement tools like jQuery. Use something like Modernizr to detect support for CSS3 animations, then use jQuery or another library to provide fallback animations for the browsers that don’t support them. It’s a win-win situation.

Requirements: CSS3 Browsers Support
Demo: http://daneden.me/animate/
License: MIT License

Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. It is a lightweight library that provides a simple API for tangling up the values in your document. Tangle.js has no dependencies, and works with any JavaScript framework, or none at all.

TangleKit is an optional collection of UI components that let your readers adjust values and visualize the results. You can grab whichever components you want, use them, extend them, modify them, or just learn from them and make your own. TangleKit also includes (and depends on) a few helpful libraries, such as MooTools, sprintf, and BVTouchable.

Requirements: Javascript enabled
Demo: http://worrydream.com/Tangle/
License: MIT License

Kendo UI framework is developed by Telerik, which is a leading provider of development and testing tools for web, desktop and mobile applications. Kendo is an HTML5, jQuery-based framework for building modern web apps.

The framework features more than 10 UI components, including a Grid and Chart, and all of the tools needed for a HTML5 app development, such as Data Binding, Templating, Drag-and-Drop API, and more. There’s no need to manually assemble a full framework for HTML app development; Kendo provides all the pieces, designed to seamlessly work together. It’s UI and much more.

Even though Kendo UI is built to leverage the power of new HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript technologies, it is also built for the realities of a world that does not universally support HTML5 today. In fact, Kendo helps developers adopt the latest in web standards faster by automatically handling the support for older browsers. It does for HTML5 application development what jQuery does for just JavaScript. Kendo UI also provides full support for mobile devices and touchscreen input.

Kendo UI is dual-licensed, Commercial and Open Source (GPLv3). The Commercial license includes full source, professional support, access to the latest Kendo UI hotfix builds, and priority influence on the Kendo UI roadmap.

Kendo UI is very easy to use, and it’s free for download as we mentioned. Why not give it a try and see if you like it or not? I am sure you will be impressed what Kendo UI can do for you.

jwerty is a JS lib which allows you to bind, fire and assert key combination strings against elements and events. It normalises the poor std api into something easy to use and clear. All jwerty events will require a jwertyCode in some way. jwertyCodes can be passed as strings, or arrays, strings being the easiest way to express a combo.

jwerty is a small library, weighing in at around 1.5kb bytes minified and gzipped (~3kb minified). jwerty has no dependencies, but is compatible with jQuery, Zepto or Ender if you include those packages alongside it.

Requirements: Javascript enabled
Demo: http://keithcirkel.co.uk/jwerty/
License: MIT License

PhoneGap is an HTML5 app platform that allows you to author native applications with web technologies and get access to APIs and app stores. PhoneGap leverages web technologies developers already know best… HTML and JavaScript.

PhoneGap is an open source implementation of open standards. That means developers and companies can use PhoneGap for mobile applications that are free, commercial, open source, or any combination of these. The PhoneGap project will always remain free and open source under an MIT license.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.phonegap.com/
License: MIT License