Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Searching within the page is a major browser functionality, but what if we could code a search box in Javascript that would do the same thing? David Walsh has shown us how to create a Search & Highlight Plugin with MooTools.

However, this is not perfect at the moment. One glaring issue is that if you search for a word, then unhighlight the word, and then look for that word with the next word (”Lorem” => “Lorem ipsum”), the searcher doesn’t find the second word due to the way the nodes are in place.

Requirements: MooTools Framework
Demo: http://davidwalsh.name/dw-content/mootools-highlight.php
License: License Free

• 3 Comments

Bumpbox is another lightbox clone with a few advantages over other lightboxes – it supports not only all common media types but also PDF’s.

Yet, the integration and implementation on your own site is pretty simple. Just add the scripts to your head section, add classes to your links that should use bumpbox, define a rel tag with the size that the bumpbox should have and you’re ready to roll.

Bumpbox automatically detects what kind of filetype you wish to show in the box, so you do not need to specify the type, easing the process of integration.

Requirements: Mootools Framework 1.2
Demo: http://www.artviper.net/bumpbox.php
License: License Free

• 19 Comments

One of great things about CSS3 is the addition of RGBA, a color mode that adds alpha-blending to your favorite CSS properties. ZURB has kicked the tires on it a bit with their own projects and have found that it helps streamline their CSS and makes scaling things like buttons very easy. To show you how, ZURB has cooked up an example of some Super Awesome Buttons with CSS3 and RGBA.

With a little CSS3 magic, we can create a scalable set of buttons with nearly half the CSS it would have taken with hex colors. Give it a go in your next project and see how it can help add that extra polish you want without huge impact on your code.

Requirements: CSS3
Demo: http://www.zurb.com/blog_uploads/0000/0401/buttons-01.html
License: License Free

• 7 Comments

You have a small area. You mouse over it. An area pops up giving you a zoomed in closer look. AnythingZoomer is a jQuery plugin that does it.

It’s flexible in many ways, in that the “small”, “large”, and “zoom” areas are all pretty easy to customize via CSS. It’s inflexible in other ways, in that it doesn’t “automatically” work by cloning content or anything like that (which is arguably more flexible), and the HTML structure is fairly rigid.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://css-tricks.com/examples/AnythingZoomer/
License: License Free

• 1 Comment

On blogs that like to share snippets of code, it is common to use the <pre> tag to wrap the code so that the spacing/indenting is maintained and long lines do not wrap. While this is desirable behavior, it can be undesirable to have those un-wrapped lines break out of their containers awkwardly and overlap other content.

On Digging Into WordPress, they taught us How to Make an Expanding Code Box by using JavaScript (jQuery) to solve this problem. One solution could potentially be to use only CSS and expand the width with something like pre:hover, but JavaScript is more elegant. It expands only when needed. It expands only to as wide as needed. And also, it expands with animation.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://diggingintowordpress.com/2009/07/making-an-expanding-code-box/
License: License Free

• 2 Comments

MattBango has shared his approach to creating a timeline out of CSS and HTML. The Pure CSS Timeline is a simple and clean looking timeline with some very straight forward markup. We have a nice looking timeline styled completely with CSS, but what happens if the visitor doesn’t have CSS enabled? Since we used unordered lists, we still have a nicely accessible list of events.

The Pure CSS Timeline may not be the perfect solution markup wise and CSS wise, but it gets the job done and is still quite accessible for all users. Take the timeline a step further. You could add some Javascript interactions, tooltips, animations, etc.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://mattbango.com/notebook/web-development/pure-css-timeline/
License: License Free

• 3 Comments

Today we’re going to break the mold of the traditional tooltip. This tutorial will demonstrate how to build tooltips that are powered by jQuery, with information pulled from a JSON array. Here’s a look at the final result that we’ll be looking to make:

Our page will have two links. When a user hovers over a link, it will trigger the top banner to change its background image and text based on the entry in a JSON array. See the Demo

We’ll be using a pack of background images in later steps. You can grab those here.

Build the Page Structure

New File: I have called my HTML file ‘json-tooltip.htm” for this tutorial

Our example’s HTML is pretty self explanatory. We’re just blocking out a banner to contain the tooltip information, and then placing all of the normal content below.

Pay special attention to what’s going on with link anchors with a class of “tooltip” though. This is the class that will designate which links are tooltips. Also, you’ll notice that the “rel” attribute contains a number. This is the number we’ll use to associate a specific tooltip to an anchor link. This will become clear in a few steps. (more…)

• 20 Comments

Would you like the Scrolling Background Effect like youlove.us? The technique is actually a lot simpler than it looks, it’s based around scrolling a very tall gradient image behind some transparent PNG images. The header image has a transparent background and solid text, while the main page is actually an image with the heading text as transparent cut outs.

The JavaScript is where the real magic happens. They have made use of the jQuery library and Alexander Farkas backgroundposition.js script to help them make the background move. The final result looks very nice. However, it might consume a lot of your CPU resources.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://youlove.us/blog/the-youloveus-scrolling-background-effect…
License: License Free

• 6 Comments

DreamCSS has written a tutorial explains how to Create Beautiful jQuery sliders with image description and name. The gallery looks so simple but elegant. The text effect it displays the image title and description is very attractive as well.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://dreamcss.comli.com/jquery sliders/
License: License Free

• 9 Comments

With 200 lines of JavaScript, you can drag and drop table content. Content of the HTML table cells can be dragged to the another table cell or another table. Script has built in autoscroll and option to forbid landing to some table cells. Table could have rowspan or colspan cells and different background color for every cell.

In order to detect destination table cells, script calculates all table cell coordinates / dimensions and store them to the arrays. Arrays are searched inside onMouseMove handler and when user release left mouse button, object will drop to the current table location.

Requirements: FireFox 3, Internet Explorer 6 and Google Chrome
Demo: http://www.redips.net/javascript/drag-and-drop-table-content/
License: License Free

• 2 Comments