Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

ShrinkSafe is a JavaScript “compression” system. It can typically reduce the size of your scripts by a third or more, depending on your programming style.

Many other tools also shrink JavaScript files, but ShrinkSafe is different. Instead of relying on brittle regular expressions, ShrinkSafe is based on Rhino, a JavaScript interpreter. This allows ShrinkSafe to transform the source of a file with much more confidence that the resulting script will function identically to the file you uploaded.

Best of all, ShrinkSafe will never change a public variable or API. That means that you can drop the compressed version of your JavaScript into your pages without changing the code that uses it. Many of your Javascript files will be condensed into a single file and compressed.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/shrinksafe/
License: License Free

• 3 Comments

Getting your email to look great in all the major email clients can be a challenge at times, so Campaign Monitor has done the hard work for you with 30 free email templates. They have tested them in all the major email clients, so add your own content and you’re all set. Grab all 30 templates in a single 113k zip file from 30 free HTML email templates.

However, not everybody has an email client that can show HTML, and some people just prefer plain text. CampaignMonitor got permission from the creators of three really well designed plain text newsletters to share modified forms of their format with you, which should save you some time and make sure that your plain text readers aren’t missing out. You can view them on Plain text templates and formatting tips.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/templates.aspx
Demo: http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/plain-text-templates.aspx
License: License Free

• 12 Comments

RobotReplay lets you record and watch your website visitors in action. Replay the actual mouse movements of your visitors. View recorded sessions of every mouse movement, click and keystroke. What areas of the page do users spend a lot of time on. Do they appear to get lost? RobotReplay allows us to see where the readers get bored in order to improve the site’s usability and convert more visitors to buyers.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.robotreplay.com/
License: License Free

• 3 Comments

Free Webmaster Tools and SEO Tools includes Backlink Checker, Google Banned Checker, Pagerank Prediction, Keywords Suggestion, Link Popularity, Search Engine Position, Alexa Traffic Rank and Broken Link Checker, etc. There are a lot more useful tools can be found in iwebtool. We should know our web application/website better in order to improve it.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://www.iwebtool.com/tools/
License: License Free

• 5 Comments

Password Strength Meters are becoming more and more popular amongst web services. Google uses one when creating a Google account. The password strength meters wil be updated for every key input the user types. So how does one go about making one of these meters? Code and Coffee created one for us, it calculates how many different combinations there are for the password you enter, then determine how many days it would take to crack your password. The algorithm returns a percentage that he then in turn convert to a nice GUI for the end user to see.

Requirements: Modern Browser with Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://www.codeandcoffee.com/wp-content/uploads/demo.html
License: License Free

• 12 Comments

R0man.de released series of Abstract Photoshop Brushes. These awesome brushes are free to use on your projects. The only requirement is a copy of Photoshop 7.0+ to use them. What are you waiting for now?

Requirements: Photoshop 7.0+
Demo: http://r0man.de/kostenlose_brushes_photoshop.htm
License: License Free

• 7 Comments

Ryan Scherf visited a site which used a drag & drop type download system where you drag an icon over another, then the download immediately starts. He realized this would be easy with the onslaught of the prototype.js and scriptaculous frameworks. Ryan Scherf shows us an example of using the built in Ajax drag & drop for Draggables / Droppables included in scriptaculous to achieve Drag to Download with Ajax.

Requirements: Prototype and Scriptaculous Frameworks
Demo: http://www.ryanscherf.net/demos/download/
License: License Free

• 5 Comments

XRAY is a free cross browser tool that lets you see the box model in action for any element, letting you see beneath the skin of any web page. Just click the XRAY button to instantly answer those vital questions: where is the top and left of this element? how big is each margin? how big is the padding? how wide and high is the content box? XRAY works just like any other bookmarklet. To install it, normally you would just drag the box marked XRAY below to the bookmarks bar in your web browser. In some browsers bookmarklets work differently: just do whatever you would normally do to create a bookmark for whatever is linked to the XRAY box below.

Requirements: Any Browsers Except Internet Explorer and Opera
Demo: http://westciv.com/xray/xray_more.html#step2
License: Open Source License

• 5 Comments

Wanna test your web application or website in different browsers and different patforms? Browsershots can help you. It makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl.

When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server of Browsershots. It supports Windows ( Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 5.0 and 6.0 ), Mac (Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.0 ), Linux ( Iceweasel 2.0, Konqueror 3.5 ).

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://browsershots.org/
License: License Free

• 9 Comments

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework/Toolkit for people who want to create full-featured web applications using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

Requirements: PHP version 4.3.2 or newer with Database
Demo: http://codeigniter.com/tutorials/
License: License Free

• 0 Comments