Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Most of todays chart libraries have a cost, pChart is intended to be free. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. Focus has been put on rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm to draw eye candy graphics. This project is still under development and new features or fix are made every week.

Requirements: PHP
Demo: http://pchart.sourceforge.net/demo.php
License: GPL License

Would you like to develop a online learning system? Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed to help educators create effective online learning communities. Moodle is a software package for producing internet-based courses and web sites. It’s an ongoing development project designed to support a social constructionist framework of education. Moodle is provided freely as Open Source software (under the GNU Public License).

Moodle can be installed on any computer that can run PHP, and can support a SQL type database (for example MySQL). It can be run on Windows and Mac operating systems and many flavors of linux (for example Red Hat or Debian GNU). You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

Moodle has a large and diverse user community with over 400,000 registered users on this site. Moodle is available in a variety of download packages with different levels of stability, as well as via CVS. A number of additional modules/plugins and language packs are also available.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://moodle.org/
License: GPL License

Sava is an Open Source ColdFusion CMS. They’ve seen that the best tools are those built to match the people who use them, both in terms of function and anticipation of common problems. This approach is at the core of Sava, a tool built to make work easier, whether it’s something as simple as adding a news release or as complex as integrating data with an enterprise CRM.

Sava is designed to help you manage your site content easily, with as little hassle as possible. Sava’s got hundreds of built-in features that make this possible – here’s a quick look at the highlights:

Easy and fast content editing – Need to fix a typo or add a new page? It takes just a couple clicks, and you’re all set. Sava takes the pain out of content management.

World-class CSS Support – Sava makes life better for CSS designers and developers, with best-in-class CSS capabilities. It really is what you’ve been looking for…

Search Engine Friendly – With clean, well-formed page structures, SEO-friendly URLs, and full control over all page content and attributes, Sava is a great choice for SEO-focused websites.

Cross Platform Flexibility – ColdFusion? Java? Linux? Windows? Mac OSX? MySQL? Microsoft SQL Server? The answer to all these questions is a resounding “Yes!”

All features- Here’s an overview of all the Sava features in one, convenient look.

Requirements: ColdFusion MX7+ or Railo 2.0+
Demo: http://www.gosava.com/sava/
License: GPL 2 License

SPAW Editor is a web based in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor control. It is a replacement for standard HTML textarea fields for rich text content editing. It includes lots of exciting features. The followings are the 2 major and interesting features SPAW Editor provides.

Tabbed Multi-document Interface
New industry unique tabbed multi-document interface feature. Now you can edit virtually unlimited number of HTML snippets in a single WYSIWYG instance. This can save a lot of screen space, unnecessary scrolling and loading time compared to other solutions where you have to load as many WYSIWYG instances as HTML snippets you want to edit.

Floating/Shared Toolbars
Multiple instances of SPAW Editor can be controlled by a single toolbar. This toolbar can either be attached to one of the instances or float around the screen. This way you can save loading time and achieve a better level of integration of the editing area into complex designs (no toolbar overhead).

Requirements: -
Demo: http://spaweditor.com/en/disp.php/en_products…
License: GPL License

jQuery UI 1.5 released with a new approach to UI. Using the “simple” approach, we were only able to serve simple interaction modules, but not full featured UI widgets. The second problem was that some plugins came from external sources making the UI suite seem disjointed and inconsistent. found an approach that kept the simplicity of jQuery while making it possible to add full featured widgets to UI. jQuery UI 1.5 is a generic API that allowed for maximum flexibility while being amazingly simple and it is simple to develop plugins for that API.

One of the first things that a user typically wants to do when using new UI controls is “skin” them to match their site’s color schemes. ThemeRoller offers a unique approach to theming UI components specifically built for jQuery UI. With ThemeRoller, you can create your very own theme for your project within minutes. It’s completely intuitive, comes wich rich controls to change the color and design of each state, and then previews your theme with the actual UI components as you work.

You now have literally millions of combinations to chose from. Any theme you create can be reached by copying the URL at any point in your progress; and after you’ve played with it enough, you can click the download button and a ZIP package is generated with the css file, the images and a demo page.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://ui.jquery.com/themeroller
License: MIT and GPL License

Phototype is a client/server-side library, based on prototype, which supports all kinds of image manipulations. On the serverside the library is powered by combination of PHP/GD that renders the image. With phototype, you are able to rotate, resize, flip and do some other cool effects to images.

Requirements: Prototype Framework
Demo: http://ajaxorized.com/phototype-image-manipulation-with-javascript
License: GPL License

SimpleModal is a lightweight jQuery plugin that provides a simple interface to create a modal dialog. The goal of SimpleModal is to provide developers with a cross-browser overlay and container that will be populated with data provided to SimpleModal.

Requirements: IE 6+, Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 3
Demo: http://www.ericmmartin.com/simplemodal/
License: MIT and GPL License

With over 70% of all attacks now carried out over the web application level, organisations need every help they can get in making their systems secure. Web application firewalls are deployed to establish an external security layer that increases security, detects, and prevents attacks before they reach web applications.

Web servers are typically well-equipped to log traffic in a form useful for marketing analyses, but fall short when it comes to logging of traffic to web applications. In particular, most are not capable of logging the request bodies. ModSecurity makes full HTTP transaction logging possible, allowing complete requests and responses to be logged. Its logging facilities also allow fine-grained decisions to be made about exactly what is logged and when, ensure only the relevant data is recorded.

In addition to providing logging facilities, ModSecurity can monitor the HTTP traffic in real time in order to detect attacks. In this case ModSecurity operates as a web intrusion detection tool, allowing you to react to suspicious events that take place at your web systems.

ModSecurity v2.5 is now available. Some of the new features include: parallel text matching, Geo IP resolution, credit card number detection, support for content injection, automated rule updates, scripting, as well as many others.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.modsecurity.org
License: GPL License

jQuery Interactive Date Range Picker is a modified version of jQuery UI’s Datepicker. This version is optimized for quickly selecting a date from a list of preset dates/ranges, and they added smooth transitions when additional options are revealed. The modifications include:

• shortcut links to preset date ranges, for example, “Past 30 days” or “Current YTD,”
• links to “All dates before…” and “All dates after…” to simplify selecting a range of values where the data set is very large or the high or low end value is an unknown
• only showing the number of calendars needed for choosing a particular range

The interactive date range picker shown is not coded for ease of modification, but is free to reuse and modify with a proper attribution to Filament Group. You can visit the demo page and view the source code to see how it works.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.filamentgroup.com/examples/datepicker/
License: GPL and Creative Commons 3.0 License