Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

FreebiesDock is simply a collection of completely free design resources. All the products you’ll see there were created exclusively for FreebiesDock and you won’t see them anywhere else. There are hundreds of “free downloads” websites, but most of them provide poor quality services.

Paul Kadysz is the proud founder of FreebiesDock who wants it to be different. It provides some quality free downloads includes WordPress themes, Website templates, Royalty free icon sets, Royalty free stock photos and Design related articles.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://freebiesdock.com/
License: License Free

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Browser Security Handbook is meant to provide web application developers, browser engineers, and information security researchers with a one-stop reference to key security properties of contemporary web browsers. Insufficient understanding of these often poorly-documented characteristics is a major contributing factor to the prevalence of several classes of security vulnerabilities.

Although all browsers implement roughly the same set of baseline features, there is relatively little standardization – or conformance to standards – when it comes to many of the less apparent implementation details. Furthermore, vendors routinely introduce proprietary tweaks or improvements that may interfere with existing features in non-obvious ways, and seldom provide a detailed discussion of potential problems.

Browser Security Handbook currently covers several hundred security-relevant characteristics of Microsoft Internet Explorer (versions 6 and 7), Mozilla Firefox (versions 2 and 3), Apple Safari, Opera, Google Chrome, and Android embedded browser.

Open-source test cases provided alongside with this document permit any other browser implementations to be quickly evaluated in a similar manner.

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

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ThemeForest has a nice feature; It allows the authors to upload zip files containing screenshots of their themes. A script then extracts these files and displays the images accordingly. NETTUS has shown us how to open zip files with PHP.

First of all, we create a simple upload form that allows the user to select a zip file. Ensure that the user chooses a zip file, and then save it to as a unique file. And then, extract the contents from the zip file and save them to a specific folder. And finally delete the zip file and echo out the contents.

Source: How to Open Zip Files with PHP

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Would you like to put snowing effect on your site? Snowstorm is a Javascript-driven snow effect that can be easily implemented into web pages. It is free for use. It has been designed to be easy to use.

A single Javascript file provides the functionality required; the only other files needed are the images of snowflakes themselves. You can adjust the snow speed, the amount of snow, the “wind”, if and where it should collect (and if it should build up over time, or quickly “melt”), and finally, whether the snow can react to the mouse moving (ie., “wind changes.”).

Snowstorm works under most of the current major browsers (IE 5.x+, Netscape 6+). Testing has been limited to those browsers on PC/Mac. You can check out the demo here.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.schillmania.com/projects/snowstorm/
License: License Free

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Mac Giving Tree has come back again! It’s the Holiday Season. The season of giving. MacHeist is going to treat us some insanely-great Mac Apps in celebration. Simply sign-up to MacHeist and come back Christmas morning to unwrap them.

And also, the Giving Tree now has iPhone application icons sprouting up around it, what does it all mean? When the icons grow and start wiggling you are able to click them and join a drawing for the application.

Source: Mac Giving Tree

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jQuery is awesome. Jon Hobbs-Smith has been using it for about a year now The longer he uses it, the more he finds out about it’s inner workings.

He calls myself an “intermediate” jQuery user and he thought some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques he has learned over the past year. Have a look at the following 25 excellent tips of jQuery, you might be able to learn something from it.

• Load the framework from Google Code
• Use a cheat sheet
• Combine all your scripts and minify them
• Use Firebug’s excellent console logging facilities
• Keep selection operations to a minimum by caching
• Keep DOM manipulation to a minimum
• Wrap everything in a single element when doing any kind of DOM insertion
• Use IDs instead of classes wherever possible
• Give your selectors a context
• Use chaining properly
• Learn to use animate properly
• Learn about event delegation
• Use classes to store state
• Even better, use jQuery’s internal data() method to store state
• Write your own selectors
• Streamline your HTML and modify it once the page has loaded
• Lazy load content for speed and SEO benefits
• Use jQuery’s utility functions
• Use noconflict to rename the jquery object when using other frameworks
• How to tell when images have loaded
• Always use the latest version
• How to check if an element exists
• Add a JS class to your HTML attribute
• Return ‘false’ to prevent default behaviour
• Shorthand for the ready event

Source: Improve your jQuery – 25 excellent tips

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An Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery was created by layering several empty divs over each other with transparent PNGs as background images.

The backgrounds were animated at different speeds using a jQuery plug-in by Alexander Farkas. This effect simulates a faux 3-D animated background dubbed the “parallax effect” originating from old-school side scrolling video games.

The robot is comprised similarly to the background animation scene by layering several DIVs together to create the different robot pieces. The final step, was animating the robot with some jQuery.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://robot.anthonycalzadilla.com/
License: License Free

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I have found an interesting article called “Maxing out your Triangle” today. He found that most people take on new jobs, projects and hobbies for three reasons: 1. To learn something new, 2. To pay the bills, 3. Because they love doing it. These three things fulfill some of our very basic needs—they give us stability, excitement, ways to contribute and opportunities to grow.

Some people might ascribe to the philosophy that it’s okay to be at a well-paid-yet-crappy day job and use the remaining time and money enjoying your hobbies. you end up missing out on pieces of the bigger (triangular) pie. There’s a certain joy that comes from doing what you love, getting compensated for it and constantly learning new things in the process. Your goal should be to maximize each experience and try to cover as many new areas of the bigger triangle as possible.

Re-evaluate everything you’re working on. Grab a pen right now and draw a triangle for every job, project and hobby. Take a good hard look at each one. What can you do to get more out of that experience? If it’s not helping you max out the bigger triangle, drop it and find something else to spend your time on.

I am really glad that I am a freelance web developer. I can learn something new every day, and I love what I am doing, at the same time, it pays the bills as well. How about you?

Source: Maxing out your Triangle

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We use Gmail everyday, do you get bored with the look of Gmail? Would you like to have a new fresh look for your Gmail? Gmail fans have been building unofficial extensions to spice up their inboxes for a while, but up til now themes haven’t been an integral part of Gmail.

Google wanted to go beyond simple color customization, so out of the 30 odd themes, there’s a shiny theme with chrome styling, another one that turns your inbox into a retro notepad, nature themes that change scenery over time, weather driven themes that can rain on your mailbox, and fun characters to keep you in good company. There’s even an old school ascii theme (Terminal) which was the result of a bet between two engineers — it’s not exactly practical, but it’s great for testing out your geek cred.

To customize your inbox, go to the Themes tab under Settings. They will be rolling out themes to everyone over the next couple of days, so if you don’t see them yet, you probably need to wait a bit. Please feel free to tell us which one you like most.

Source: Spice up your inbox with colors and themes

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There is a lot of money being made in Open Source, although the profitable companies are not always the ones you would expect.

While many companies don’t disclose detailed financial information we have dug around to find numbers for some well-known open source companies and projects to see how they are doing financially. Royal Pingdom has collected the financial information of some of the most popular open source companies.

One of the great examples is Mozilla which has the famous Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email client. In 2006 the Mozilla Corporation generated $66.8 million in revenue with 85% of the revenue coming from Google for being the default search engine and ads placed on search result pages. Google and Mozilla recently extended the deal to 2011 (just before Google launched Chrome, ironically).

You can have look at other popular open source companies like Canonical, Novell, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Yahoo and Nokia.

Source: This is the money being made TODAY in Open Source

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