Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Open Flash Chart is a charting component made by Flash. Open Flash Chart, is open source. It is free to use and you get the source code to fiddle with. You can create some really nice looking Bar Charts, Pie Charts, Area Charts and etc… easily. To use it, you simply need to include the Open Flash Chart in your HTML, and provide the data file on the server. The data file is either a text file, or a .php, Perl, Python, Java (or another flavour of dynamic) page.

Requirements: Flash 8+
Demo: http://teethgrinder.co.uk/open-flash-chart/
License: GPL License

Digistore Ecommerce is a fully featured store based on the popular osCommerce engine. Boasting improvements both to the administration and the end user experience – Digistore has quickly become a popular choice for people wishing to market products online.

Digistore allows users to be ‘live’ and selling only minutes after installation is complete. Digistore is a full content management system that requires no HTML or programming knowledge to operate. Now available for download completely free of charge under the General Public License Agreement.

You can see Digistore Demo Shop from the screenshot above. It works like otherEcommerce software solutions. Add items to cart and then checkout, you can also view your cart items on the left hand side any time.

Digistore Admin Area above is clean and easy to use. Digistore has the following Exclusive Features as well.

• HTMLarea ( WYSIWYG editor) help
• Advanced template colour and layout control help
• Instore advertisement manager help
• Thumbnail and large product images
• Express checkout option
• Secure administration login and access control

You can view all features and requirements here.

Requirements: PHP Server with MySQL
Demo: http://digistore.co.nz/
License: GPL License

OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.

OpenCart is designed feature rich, easy to use, search engine friendly and with a visually appealing interface. It is not as pretty as Magento, but it is still a very good alternative of paid shopping cart system. Now, log on to the administration section to see how the back-end works with Username: demo / Password: demo.

Visit the live demonstration site to get a feel for how OpenCart works. This is simple template populated with some sample products and cateogries.

Requirements: Apache, PHP 5+ and MySQL
Demo: http://www.opencart.com/demonstration
(Username: demo / Password: demo)
License: GPL License

Tablesorter is a jQuery plugin for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. Tablesorter can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell. It has many useful features including:

• Multi-column sorting
• Parsers for sorting text, URIs, integers, currency, floats, IP addresses, dates (ISO, long and short formats), time. Add your own easily
• Support for ROWSPAN and COLSPAN on TH elements
• Support secondary “hidden” sorting (e.g., maintain alphabetical sort when sorting on other criteria)
• Extensibility via widget system
• Small code size (7,4kb packed)

*** You can sort multiple columns simultaneously by holding down the shift key and clicking a second, third or even fourth column header.

Requirements: jQuery
Demo: http://tablesorter.com/
License: GPL and MIT License

We have got an official User Interface Library of jQuery eventually… It is called jQuery UI, is a set of themable widgets and interactions, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications.The core of the library revolves around different mouse interactions, namely drag and dropping, sorting, selecting, and resizing.

On top of the core interactions are built a number of reusable widgets, including accordions, date pickers, dialogs, sliders, table sorters, and tabs. Finally, the library is finished off with a few effects that you can use to liven up your site, specifically magnifier and shadow. The photo gallery and the speed testing application is particular impressive which shows you the power of the UI.

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

Democracy Ajax Poll is a WordPress plugin which adds polling functionality to your WordPress blog. It grew out of frustration with the only other WordPress polling option, WP-poll. It didn’t have valid markup, it was clunky, and it required one heck of an installation process.

This plugin uses Ajax for quick sending and loading of poll data, although it doesn’t depend on javascript to function. It is fully functional in non-javascript environments, meaning it will work in ALL browsers. The Ajax part is tested to work in Safari, Opera, Firefox, and IE6/Win.

Democracy Ajax Poll also has a full-featured admin panel, which allows one to manage their polls. You can activate, edit, delete, and add new polls from the admin panel. It uses cookies as well as IP logging to prevent users from working spamming the ballot box. It is good looking and also allows in-post polling. The most important point is that there is no linkback of author on the poll, so it looks like it is really your own poll which is better than PollDaddy polls.

Requirements: WordPress 2.0 or Greater
Demo: http://blog.jalenack.com/archives/democracy
License: GPL License

CSSTidy allows you to optimise your CSS code in order to have faster loading pages and lower traffic costs. So both you and your visitors benefit from an optimisation. CSSTidy is an opensource CSS parser and optimiser. It is available as executeable file (available for Windows, Linux and OSX) which can be controlled per command line and as PHP script (both with almost the same functionality).

In opposite to most other CSS parsers, no regular expressions are used and thus CSSTidy has full CSS2 support and a higher reliability. An online version of CSSTidy is also avaliable.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: http://cdburnerxp.se/cssparse/css_optimiser.php
License: GPL License

BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website. Implementation of the tooltips, however, requires no knowledge of DHTML or javascript. There are many tweaks which can be set to customise it to your needs by setting through a tag’s “title” attribute. Some of them are very useful.

• Specifies the header and body text of the tooltip
• Specifies CSS class for styles to be used on tooltip header and body.
• Make tooltip stick to side of the window if user moves close to the side of the screen.
• Specifies whether to halt the tooltip when the user double clicks on the HTML element with the tooltip.
• Specifies whether to hide all SELECT boxes on page when popup is activated.
• Specifies whether to fade tooltip into visibility and how fast to fade in tooltip.
• Specifies delay in milliseconds before tooltip displays.

Requirements: Internet Explorer 5+, Mozilla 1.4+, FireFox 0.9.3+, Opera 7+
Demo: http://boxover.swazz.org/example.html
License: GNU License

RoundCube is a modern webmail solution which is easy to install and that runs on a standard PHP/MySQL configuration. The skins use the latest web standards such as XHTML and CSS 2. There are many exciting features RoundCube provides, for example, Multilingual capabilities, Full support of HTML, Find-as-you-type address book integration, Spell Checking and Complete customization with skins. RoundCube Webmail is released under the GPL License. Everyone is welcome to download and use it, deploy it and to re-distribute it.

Requirements: Server with PHP and mySQL
Demo: http://roundcube.net/?p=demo
License: GPL License