Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

The YUI team is pleased to announce the public availability of YUI 3.0 Preview Release 1, an early look at what they’re working on for the next generation of the YUI Library. Documentation for YUI 3.0 is on the YUI website; the download is available on the YUI project area on SourceForge;  Keep in mind that this is an early preview, not a production-quality (or even a beta) release. This release is not suitable for production use, but it will give you an idea of what they’re working on, and it should provide a good framework for conversation about the future of the library. They’ve set five design goals for the next generation of the library. What you’ve told us is that YUI 3.0 should be:

• lighter (less K-weight on the wire and on the page for most uses)
• faster (fewer http requests, less code to write and compile, more efficient code)
• more consistent (common naming, event signatures, and widget APIs throughout the library)
• more powerful (do more with less implementation code)
• more securable (safer and easier to expose to multiple developers working in the same environment)

Requirements: -
Demo: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/3/
License: BSD License

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Canvas 3D Graph is a special type of bar graph that plot numbers in 3D. <canvas> tag is not supported in IE, so the author was forced to use excanvas.js in order to draw graph in IE. As the result of that, you may experience some freezes when you try to plot large amount of data in IE. Firefox and safari works just fine (aprox 10x faster than emulated canvas in IE). This is initial release, he planned to add many more features, so stay stay tuned for the updates.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://dragan.yourtree.org/code/canvas-3d-graph/
License: BSD License

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SoundManager 2 is an attempt at providing the sound API which Javascript has been missing. It’s a Javascript library which wraps and extends Flash’s sound capabilities, bringing cross-platform audio functionality to Javascript. SoundManager 2 was written to meet a desire to have Javascript-driven sound for interactive web-based projects. It is free for use in both personal and commercial projects. View / hear some of the examples of Javascript-driven sound, and applications implementing SoundManager 2. They are really impressive.

Requirements: Flash 8+
Demo: http://schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/
License: BSD License

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The JavaScript image cropper UI allows the user to crop an image using an interface with the same features and styling as found in commercial image editing software, and is is based on the Prototype JavaScript framework and script.aculo.us. Drag to draw areas, selection area can be moved and resized. It allows dynamic preview of resultant crop (if minimum width & height are provided), this is implemented as a subclass so can be removed if not required. All functionality & display compatible with most popular browsers.

Requirements: IE 6 & 5.5, Firefox 1.5, Opera 8.5 & 9.0b, Camino 1.0, Safari 2.0
Demo: http://www.defusion.org.uk/demos/060519/cropper.php
License: BSD License

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Zend Framework is a leading open-source PHP framework has a flexible architecture that lets you easily build modern web applications and web services. Zend Framework is based on simplicity, object-oriented best practices, corporate friendly licensing, and a rigorously tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure, reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services.

Zend Framework provides a lightweight, loosely-coupled component library simplified to provide 4/5s of the functionality everyone needs and that lets you customize the other 20% to meet your specific business needs. By focusing on the most commonly needed functionality, they retain the simplified spirit of PHP programming, dramatically lower the learning curve, and your training costs – so developers get up-to-speed quickly. They do this with:

• An extensible and well-tested code base – easy to augment
• A flexible architecture – not locked-in to a rigid application structure
• No configuration files necessary to get up and running – or when maintaining and deploying your apps

Requirements: PHP version of 5.1.4+
Demo: http://framework.zend.com
License: New BSD License

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Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Developed and used over two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly. Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle. It has the following main features.

Object-relational mapper
Define your data models entirely in Python. You get a rich, dynamic database-access API for free — but you can still write SQL if needed.

Automatic admin interface
Save yourself the tedious work of creating interfaces for people to add and update content. Django does that automatically, and it’s production-ready.

Elegant URL design
Design pretty, cruft-free URLs with no framework-specific limitations. Be as flexible as you like.

Template system
Use Django’s powerful, extensible and designer-friendly template language to separate design, content and Python code.

Cache system
Hook into memcached or other cache frameworks for super performance — caching is as granular as you need.

Internationalization
Django has full support for multi-language applications, letting you specify translation strings and providing hooks for language-specific functionality.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.djangoproject.com/
License: BSD License

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Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player.

Flare applications can be built using the free Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe’s Flex Builder IDE. Flare is based on prefuse, a full-featured visualization toolkit written in Java. Flare is open source software licensed under the terms of the BSD license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

Requirements: Flash
Demo: http://flare.prefuse.org/demo/
License: BSD License

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FastFind Menu Script is a javascript menu created by ActiveSpotLight under the BSD License. It pulls a content feed as data to populate the menu, this can be static or dynamic. The version they use internally uses JSON/XML as data feeds. This script allows for nested menus, based on dynamic Ajax responses. The menu can also be dragged/dropped by using the jQuery Interface Library. I really like the menu because it is very clean and smooth. It is very extremely useful for any web applications that has no space to place a menu.

FastFind Menu Script is still under development and has been tested in FF1.5-2, IE 6-7, Opera 9, and Safari. The current build has the following issues in Safari: Arrows do not appear to show in-menu versus external links, as appear in the other browsers.

Requirements: JQuery Framework and Interface for jQuery
Demo: http://labs.activespotlight.net/jQuery/menu_demo.html
License: BSD 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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Timeplot is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for plotting time series and overlay time-based events over them (with the same data formats that Timeline supports). Just like Timeline or Google Maps, Timeplot can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side. You can populate Timeplot with data by pointing it to an space or comma separated file. Timeplot also supports Timeline’s XML format, meaning that you can reuse the same data file of your Timeline and overlay them over a time series plot. It looks so specialized and works smoothly. It is a very great charts tool to represent complex data.

Requirements: Any Browsers supprts Javascript
Demo: http://simile.mit.edu/timeplot/
License: BSD License

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