Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing. Some people think this is not necessary to have a framework for just CSS. On the other side, some people think CSS frameworks is there to improve effeciency and give you a better start from the gate. You decide.

As a result of this unexpected surge in traffic, the entire project has moved to Google Code.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://bjorkoy.com/blueprint
License: MIT License

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The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses. YUI version 2.3.0 has just released on July 31, 2007 with six new additions to the library as well as a new skinning architecture and a new visual treatment for most of our UI controls. The new features include Rich Text Editor, Base CSS, YUILoader Utility, ImageLoader Utility, Color Picker Control, YUI Test Utility.

Requirements: Modern Browsers
Demo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/
License: BSD License

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CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework/Toolkit for people who want to create full-featured web applications using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

Requirements: PHP version 4.3.2 or newer with Database
Demo: http://codeigniter.com/tutorials/
License: License Free

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Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. Dojo allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. With Dojo you can build degradable user interfaces more easily, prototype interactive widgets quickly, and animate transitions. Dojo’s event system, I/O APIs, and generic language enhancement form the basis of a powerful programming environment. When you write scripts with Dojo, you can include as little or as much of the available APIs as you need to suit your needs.

Requirements: Safari 2.0.x, Opera 9.0+, Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 1+, Konqueror 3.5+
Demo: http://dojotoolkit.org/demos
License: Academic Free License, BSD License

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Ext is a JavaScript framework for building web applications. In early 2006, Jack Slocum began working on a set of extension utilities for the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) library. These extensions were quickly organized into an independent library of code and distributed under the name “yui-ext“. By the end of the year, the library had gained so much in popularity that the name was changed simply to Ext, a reflection of its maturity and independence as a framework.

Requirements: Internet Explorer 6+, FireFox 1.5+, Safari 2+, Opera 9+
Demo: http://extjs.com/deploy/ext/docs/index.html
License: LGPL License

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jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. You can animate hiding, showing, and toggling the display of elements easily. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. It is lightweight (20kb) which supports CSS 1-3 and basic Xpath syntax. If you have not tried it yet, please try it, I am sure you will be amazed.

Interface is a collection of rich interface components which utilizes the lightweight JavaScript library jQuery. With this components you can build rich client web applications and interfaces with the same simplicity as writing JavaScript with jQuery.

Requirements: Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox 1.5+, Safari 2.0+, Opera 9.0+
Demo: JQuery – http://jquery.com Interface – http://interface.eyecon.ro/demos
License: MIT and GPL License

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Script.aculo.us provides you with easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make your web sites and web applications fly. You can implement different modern effects easily, for example Fade in/out, Blind in/out, Drag and drop, Slide in/out, highlight, AutoComplete and Sortable List, etc. It is one of the most popular animation framworkm which is really powerful and similar to Mootools, however the size of the package is larger than Mootools. Here is the sample code.

new Effect.Opacity(’my_element’, { duration: 2.0, transition: Effect.Transitions.linear, from: 1.0, to: 0.5 });

Requirements: Required Prototype
Demo: http://wiki.script.aculo.us/scriptaculous/show/Demos
License: MIT License

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When we are coding with javascript especially with some cool effects, e.g. Fade in/out, slide up/down, drag and drop effects, and etc… We need a javascript framework to allow us doing simple Ajax request and all these cool effects easily. MooTools lets you get the job done efficiently and effectively. It is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework designed to make writing extensible and compatible code easier and faster. Compared to Prototype 1.5 + Scriptaculous (excluding unittest/controls) 60800k, MooTools is only 34165k.

Requirements: Safari, Internet Explorer 6.0+, Firefox, Opera and Camino
Demo: http://demos.mootools.net
License: MIT License

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When we are developing web application using PHP, it is not a one day process. Sometimes, we spent few months writing PHP code. If the code we wrote were very messy, it is very hard to understand what we wrote previously. So that, we need a PHP framework to work in a structured and rapid manner.

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. The goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

Requirements: HTTP server, PHP 4.3.2+, Database Engine
Demo: http://manual.cakephp.org/
License: MIT License

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Prototype framework enables you to deal with Ajax in a very easy way. It simplifies the way of using Javascript and deals in a smart way with JavaScript code returned from a server and provides helper classes for polling. And also, it is cross-browser compatible.

The biggest part of the Prototype framework are its DOM extensions. Prototype adds many convenience methods to elements returned by the $() function: for instance, you can write $('editForm').addClassName('active').show() to get the element with the ID ‘editForm‘, add a class name to it and show it (if it was previously hidden).

This framework can save you more than 50% on coding javascript and developing an ajax driven with large amount of DOM manipulations web site. If you have not tried it, please have a look. A well-defined framework is needed for developing a professional web application.

Requirements: Any Browsers
Demo: http://www.prototypejs.org/api
License: MIT License

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