Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

boomerang is a piece of javascript that you add to your web pages, where it measures the performance of your website from your end user’s point of view. It has the ability to send this data back to your server for further analysis.

With boomerang, you find out exactly how fast your users think your site is. boomerang comes to you from the Exceptional Performance team at Yahoo!, aided by the Yahoo! Developer Network. boomerang is opensource and released under the BSD license, and they have a whole bunch of documentation about it.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://yahoo.github.com/boomerang/doc/
License: BSD License

• 0 Comments

Dojo Toolkit 1.5 is now available download. Dojo is a JavaScript toolkit that is lean enough for use on a simple blog, yet powerful enough to scale to solve the most advanced web application engineering challenges, allowing you to use just the features and flexibility needed for your application. The 11th major Dojo release, version 1.5 offers many important improvements and enhancements and remains as IP-safe, freely-licensed, and free to use as the first release over five years ago.

The new version of Dojo offers substantial user interface improvements in the form of the beautiful Claro theme. Claro delivers a modern and engaging visual style for rich internet applications with Dojo’s Dijit library, with the visual enhancements of transparent gradient background images, drop shadows, and appropriate CSS animations (on Webkit and Mozilla-based browsers).

Requirements: -
Demo: http://download.dojotoolkit.org/release-1.5.0…
License: Academic Free, BSD License

• 0 Comments

Whichloadsfaster is a fun way to spread the word that web performance matters. It’s about friendly competition and about testing in everybody’s browser, not just ones that have nice performance tools already.

Whichloadsfaster is open source, written in HTML and JavaScript and runs entirely on the client-side. You can host the files on your own site and tweak them to suit your own nefarious plans. You can download Whichloadfast on github.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.whichloadsfaster.com/
License: BSD License

• 2 Comments

Anologue is an approach to ad hoc, linear dialogue in realtime. With anologue you can quickly and easily engage in an anonymous (or not) linear dialogue with any number of people (within reason). There is no accounts or installations required. Your “chat room” is created by the time this link loads.

Best of all: Anologue is open source. built with php 5.3.1, using the most non-heinous, totally rad lithium framework, couchdb, jquery, a few other scripts as well as some classy, original and established iconography for ui; all coming together for the conversational goodness you’re about to experience.

Requirements: PHP 5.3, CouchDB, rad-dev account
Demo: http://anologue.com/add
License: BSD License

• 5 Comments

SliderNav is a JQuery plugin that lets you add dynamic, sliding content using a vertical navigation bar (index). It is made mainly for alphabetical listings but can be used with anything, though longer words can look a bit awkward.

SliderNav automatically adds the navigation and sets the height for the object based on how tall the navigation is, in order to make sure users have access to the entire list. We used overflow: auto; property for the actual content so you can use your mousewheel to scroll through the content as well. It has been tested (and works fine) on Firefox 3, Chrome 5, IE7, Safari 4 and Opera 10.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://devgrow.com/slidernav-jquery-plugin/
License: MIT, BSD, and GPL License

• 5 Comments

Griddy is a small JQuery plugin thats creates a simple, customizable grid overlay on top of any element. It can also calculate row heights and column widths automatically based on the number of rows/columns and gutter space. There are few options, including: rows, row height, row gutter, columns, column height, column width, color and opacity.

All of the styling is done inline to avoid linking to an external CSS file or having to use images. The numbers on top are column widths, the numbers running along the left side are row heights. You can also look at 960.gs grid overlay which does the similar thing.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://devgrow.com/griddy-overlay/
License: MIT, BSD, GPL License

• 6 Comments

Roundabout is a jQuery plugin that converts a structure of static HTML elements into a highly customizable turntable-like interactive area. In its simplest configuration, Roundabout works with ordered- and unordered-lists, however after some quick configuration, Roundabout can work with an set of nested elements.

Roundabout Shapes provide even more paths along which your Roundabout can move. The current version of Roundabout Shapes offers nine additional movements. Like its Roundabout companion, Roundabout Shpaes is released under the BSD license.

Requirements: jQuery 1.2.3+, 1.3.x or 1.4.x*
Demo: http://fredhq.com/projects/roundabout/
License: BSD License

• 3 Comments

Ymacs is an Emacs-like editor that works in your browser. Which applies, at this state of affairs, only if your browser is Firefox. It looks pretty good with other browsers, but it is unable to catch all the required key bindings at the moment.

If you are an Emacs user, then you should feel like home with Ymacs. By default Ymacs uses Emacs idioms and key bindings. It should be easy to customize it, however, to mimic other editors.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.ymacs.org/
License: BSD License

• 3 Comments

Validatious 2.0 is an easy form validation with unobtrusive JavaScript. Validatious requires no JavaScript library. However, if you’re already using one, Validatious can easily work with it, and even benefit from it.

There are several settings allow you to control how and when Validatious does validation, how it displays errors and more. If configuring isn’t enough, callbacks and easy overriding gives you complete control.

You can also add custom validators with only a couple of lines of JavaScript. If your site’s language is not english, you probably don’t want error messages in english. There are several ways of changing languages as well.

Requirements: Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://validatious.org/learn/examples
License: BSD License

• 8 Comments

Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby progamming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms.

Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments. Best of all, Spree is completely free, the open source code is freely available and is licensed under the New BSD License.

Requirements: Ruby on Rails
Demo: http://spreecommerce.com/demo
License: New BSD License

• 0 Comments