Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

The SitePoint online CSS and HTML references have been available for some time now, and have already become a valued source of free information for web designers and developers around the world. Recently, Sitepoint has announced a shiny new look to the SitePoint Reference Site and the highly anticipated first release of JavaScript Reference Information.

The look and feel of the old reference site has been completely replaced with a brand new slick, easy-to read design, including interactive examples, improved navigation, page layout and much more…

Source: SitePoint CSS, HTML & JavaScript Online References

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A while ago, we had a Comparison Between Zend and CakePHP Framework. A lot of our readers have given us some valuable opinions about these two frameworks. Now we are going to look at how Glenn Vanderburg compare Prototype with jQuery, and why he still prefers Prototype to jQuery.

He concluded that jQuery is a very nice piece of work, and makes some common tasks easier than their Prototype equivalents. Where it’s good indeed. But its design is uneven, and its scope is limited.

For him, at least, Prototype is still the tool of choice. he thinks it’s a richer, more thorough, and overall better designed library. You can view the detailed comparison of Prototype and jQuery here.

Glenn Vanderburg does not intend this to be an anti-jQuery screed. Neither is it an exhaustive comparison of Prototype and jQuery. Simply put: praise has been lopsided in favor of jQuery of late, and he feels like singing the praises of his personal favorite.

Please feel free to share your opinions about these two most popular JavaScript libraries.

Source: Why I still prefer Prototype to jQuery

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More and more applications these days are migrating to the Web. Without platform constraints or installation requirements, the software-as-a-service model looks very attractive. To compete with desktop applications, Web apps must offer simple, intuitive and responsive user interfaces that let their users get things done with less effort and time.

In the past we didn’t cover web applications the way we should and now it’s time to take a closer look at some useful techniques and design solutions that make web-applications more user-friendly and more beautiful.

SmashingMagazine presents the first part of our extensive research on design patterns and useful design solutions in modern web applications. You’ll find a collection of 10 useful interface design techniques and best practices used in many successful web-applications.

Source: 10 Useful Web Application Interface Techniques

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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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