Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

CSS Level 3 brings with it some incredibly powerful styling features. Rounded corners, soft drop shadows, gradient fills, and so on. CSS3 promises to do away with all that! But as we all know, due to Internet Explorer’s lack of support for any of these features, we need CSS3 PIE.

PIE stands for Progressive Internet Explorer. It is an IE attached behavior which, when applied to an element, allows IE to recognize and display a number of CSS3 properties. CSS3 PIE makes Internet Explorer 6-8 capable of rendering several of the most useful CSS3 decoration features.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://css3pie.com/
License: License Free

Tutorialzine are teaching us how to build a cross-browser, jQuery Custom Confirm Dialog Replacement. You can choose the text, buttons, and actions that will be executed when they are clicked.

You can customize the appearance of the dialog by modifying jquery.confirm.css. As the message attribute of the dialog takes HTML text, you can further customize it by displaying images and icons in the confirm window. You can even alternatively use this plugin as an alert dialog – you will just need to pass a single button with no action attribute.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://demo.tutorialzine.com/2010/12/better-confirm-box…
License: License Free

You have probably seen face detection at work in programs like iPhoto and Picasa, but what if you could do that performantly in JavaScript? Chinese developer Liu Liu has done the honors, and implemented Face Detection in JavaScript via HTML5 Canvas.

The algorithm is implemented on top of a JS port of a C-based computer vision library by the same author. It works off a grayscale version of the image, and seems to be quite reliable in detecting faces in photographs. The demo then draws a red box around each face in the picture, but the library could be used to do much more interesting things with this data.

Requirements: Javascript, HTML5 Canvas
Demo: http://badassjs.com/post/1461943420/face-detection…
License: License Free

Animated Gif Generator lets you easily create an animated gif by uploading a series of still images (gif, jpg, or png). Simply use the form to upload each image as desired. Once you’ve uploaded your images, you can also change the order of the images by dragging on each frame, or delete a frame by clicking the “x” icon. It is really a handy tool if you would like to create gif images online.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/animatedgif/
License: License Free

Spritebox is a WYSIWYG tool to help web designers quickly and easily create CSS classes and IDs from a single sprite image. It is based on the principle of using the background-postion property to align areas of a sprite image into block elements of a web page. It was made using a combination of jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5, and it totally free to use.

Requirements: jQuery, CSS3, HTML5
Demo: http://www.spritebox.net/
License: License Free

Google SketchUp is the finest (and most innovative) tool available for anyone designing anything from coffee pots to skyscrapers. You can create 3D modelling easily with it.

Redecorate your living room. Design a new piece of furniture. Model your city for Google Earth. There’s no limit to what you can create with SketchUp. There are also dozens of video tutorials, an extensive Help Center and a worldwide user community mean that anyone who wants to make 3D models with Google SketchUp, can.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://sketchup.google.com/
License: License Free

OAuth can be a tricky concept to wrap your head around at first, but with the Twitter API now requiring its use, it is something you need to understand before creating a Twitter application. This tutorial: Creating a Twitter OAuth Application will introduce you to OAuth, and walk you through the process of creating a basic application.

Requirements: OAuth
Demo: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/creating-a-twitter-oauth-application/
License: License Free

Custom scrollbar plugin utilizing jquery UI that’s fully customizable with CSS. It features vertical/horizontal scrolling, mouse-wheel support (via Brandon Aaron jquery mouse-wheel plugin), scroll easing and adjustable scrollbar height/width.

You simply need to include jquery.min.js and jquery-ui.min.js, the jquery.easing.1.3.js (the plugin that handles animation easing), jquery.mousewheel.min.js (to support mouse-wheel functionality) and the jquery.mCustomScrollbar.css which is the file where you can style your content and scrollbars.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://manos.malihu.gr/tuts/jquery_custom_scrollbar.html
License: License Free

Contained Sticky Scroll allows you to create an element that will “stick” to the top of the window as the user scrolls, but which will not move outside of its parent element.

The download package contains both full and minified versions of the .js file, along with a demo page which explains the various options that can be used to configure each initialization of the plugin’s functionality. It has been tested the plugin in recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer 8.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://blog.echoenduring.com/wp-content/uploads/demos…
License: License Free