Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

CSScaffold is a CSS framework written in PHP. Rather than try and create a static framework that uses the standard abilities of CSS, like Blueprint, it uses PHP to extend CSS. The syntax looks and feels exactly like CSS, except that you have some new, powerful abilities.

The best part is that all of this is done transparently. You can drop Scaffold into your site and you’ll instantly have access to all of its functionality. Scaffold requires a web server with PHP 5+. Mod_rewrite for Apache is required if you want it work automatically route your css files through Scaffold.

Requirements: PHP 5+
Demo: http://github.com/anthonyshort/csscaffold
License: New BSD License

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JoobsBox is an extensible open source job board. The goal is to have the JoobsBox as a framework, light and fast and let the community to expand this, limited only by their desires and imagination. Plugins can extend JoobsBox to do almost anything with their job board.

Themes allows the community to share their templates and find the right look for their job board. JoobsBox focus will be towards standards, usability and users needs. You are free to use it for anything from your job section of your blog to a job board that will surpasse Yahoo HotJobs. You might want to look at alternative open source job board solution: JobberBase as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://demo.joobsbox.com/
License: New BSD License

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PHP Security Consortium (PHPSC) is an international group of PHP experts dedicated to promoting secure programming practices within the PHP community. Members of the PHPSC seek to educate PHP developers about security through a variety of resources, including documentation, tools, and standards. You can read the PHP Security Guide they have published.

In addition to their educational efforts, the PHPSC engages in exploratory and experimental research in order to develop and promote standards of best practice for PHP application development. PHP Security Consortium has developed PHPSecInfo in order to help developers and system administrators audit PHP environments.

PHPSecInfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports security information about the PHP environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. It is not a replacement for secure development techniques, and does not do any kind of code or app auditing, but can be a useful tool in a multilayered security approach.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://phpsec.org/projects/phpsecinfo/index.html
License: New BSD License

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As security expert Bruce Schneier said recently, password masking is not a panacea. Finding a solution that provides both security and usability is the goal.

HashMask is a jQuery plugin that will produce a unique and non reversible visualization of a users password. The hope being that they would be able to confirm that they entered their password correctly, but no one else would. It also degrades gracefully so that users without javascript or a poor browser (IE6) will just see a password field.

Technically speaking, it uses a subset of the sha1 hash of the password as the seed for the sparkline’s shape and color. It should be relatively safe from reverse engineering as a result. There is the potential to estimate a possible range of characters of the first section of the hash, but overall this should be a extremely low risk.

Requirements: Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://lab.arc90.com/2009/07/hashmask.php
License: BSD License

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QuickFlip is a jQuery plugin that uses a CSS trick to cause a div, paragraph or any other piece of HTML markup to flip like a card. QuickFlip uses two panels: a front and a back. When a flip occurs, the front panel is split in half with Javascript. The right and left halves slide into one another, and afterwards the opposite occurs with the back panel.

QuickFlip 2 is now even easier to implement. The new script pulls in and applies the necessary styling, so there is no need to include a QuickFlip stylesheet or to define the dimensions of the panel you’re flipping.

Additionally, QuickFlip 2 makes triggering the flip effect much simpler due to a new flip function that can be attached to any jQuery selector. Finally, the QuickFlip plugin has been performance-tuned and is running pretty quickly.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://jonraasch.com/blog/quickflip-2-jquery-plugin
License: FreeBSD License

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Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using the canvas element. It takes a graphical approach to data visualization, composing custom views of data with simple graphical primitives like bars and dots. These primitives are called marks, and each mark encodes data visually through dynamic properties such as color and position. Although marks are simple by themselves, you can combine them in interesting ways to make rich, interactive visualizations.

To facilitate this, Protovis supports panels and inheritance. A panel is a container for marks; the contained marks are replicated for each data point on the panel. You can vary the panel position to create small multiple displays, or you can overlay panels. Inheritance lets you derive new marks from existing ones, while sharing some or all of the same properties. This is the same principle as cascading in CSS, or prototypal inheritance in JavaScript.

Please note: Protovis is in its early stages of development. At the moment, they only support Firefox 3, but they plan on adding support for Chrome and Safari 4.

Requirements: Firefox 3
Demo: http://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/
License: BSD License

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There are a number of tools such as DataTables which provide enhanced access to HTML tables for Javascript capable browsers. However, these tools often lack keyboard accessibility. KeyTable addresses this by allowing Excel like cell navigation on any table.

KeyTable is a Javascript library which provides keyboard navigation and event binding for any HTML table. With KeyTable Excel style table navigation can be employed to provide features such as editing of a table without requiring a mouse. Simply navigate to the cell you wish to edit and hit return. This initialises the excellent jEditable plug-in for jQuery – make your edit and then hit return again to save.

Requirements: IE 6+, Firefox 3+, Safari 3+, Opera 9.6
Demo: http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/article/KeyTable
License: GPL or BSD License

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DataTables is a jQuery plugin for building tables. It was designed for progressive enhancement of tabular HTML data, giving the end user a wide range of options for customising the display of that data as they wish. It is very easy to integrate DataTables directly into your web-site or web-application.

The core features of DataTables includes Ajax auto loading of data, Variable length pagination, Multi-column sorting, Single column filtering, Type detection for dynamic data, Smart handling of column widths, Fully internationalisable, Themeable by CSS and it is Free!

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://www.sprymedia.co.uk/dataTables-1.4/example_zero_config.html
License: GPL, BSD License

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Xinha is a powerful WYSIWYG HTML editor component that works in Mozilla based browsers as well as in MS Internet Explorer. Its configurabilty and extensibility make it easy to build just the right editor for multiple purposes, from a restricted mini-editor for one database field to a full-fledged website editor. Its liberal, BSD licence makes it an ideal candidate for integration into any kind of project.

Xinha is Open Source, and they take this seriously. There is no company that owns the source but a community of professionals who just want Xinha to be the best tool for their work.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://xinha.webfactional.com/wiki/Examples
License: BSD License

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Minify is a PHP5 app that can combine multiple CSS or Javascript files, compress their contents (i.e. removal of unnecessary whitespace/comments), and serve the results with HTTP encoding (gzip/deflate) and headers that allow optimal client-side caching.

Yahoo’s Combo Handler and Google’s AJAX Libraries API both serve content from their heavy-duty CDNs and potentially increase the chance that your visitor will already have a file in her browser cache. Neither service serves custom content that you provide. You may wish to use these services to serve popular libraries and Minify to serve your code.

Minify is distributed under the New BSD License, which means that you’re free to use, modify, and redistribute Minify or derivative works thereof, even for commercial purposes, as long as you comply with a few simple requirements. See the License file for details.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://code.google.com/p/minify/
License: New BSD License

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