Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

MegaZine 3 is an open source pageflip/flashbook engine, written completely in AS3. It generates an interactive book, which can then be flipped through by the user. MegaZine 3 uses a completely dynamic approach, allowing full configuration through an external XML file. This makes it easy to set up books even if you do not even own the Flash IDE.

MegaZine 3 automatically generates a control bar that allows jumping to every individual page. It also generates thumbnails for the pages, to make it easier for the user to find a page again, or getting a first impression.

Requirements: Flash Required
Demo: http://megazine.mightypirates.de/demo/index.html
License: LGPL License

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Everyone loves the Gmail and Facebook inline chat modules. This Gmail/Facebook Style jQuery Chat Module enables you to seamlessly integrate Gmail/Facebook style chat into your existing website.

You can see the chat box displays at the bottom right hand corner of the screen. You can keep the chat boxes open and stores state (data) even when pages are browsed/refreshed. It will display “Sent at…” after 3 minutes of inactivity. You can also minimize and close chat boxes easily.

This chat script can be used for free under LGPL-style license for non-commercial purposes. However, you need to purchase a license for commercial purposes.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://anantgarg.com/2009/05/13/gmail-facebook-style-jquery-chat/
License: LGPL License

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Sigma Grid is written in pure javascript, which is an Ajax data grid for displaying and inline editing data in a scrollable and sortable table. Sigma grid appearance is controled via a stand-alone CSS(style sheet). Developer can change grid skin by defining themes in different CSS files.

It supports online printing, to make it easy to print tabular data in WYSIWYG way. Paging enable developer display data page by page. Data will not be retrieved from server side until end user come to the page it is at. End user can sort records by clicking on the header of a column. Developer may define a new data type and a new way to sort.

Bar diagram, line diagram and pie diagram are built in. Translation tabular data into diagram without any server-side coding. Data filter enables sigma grid to present the data users are interested in only. And you can download and use Sigma Grid freely under LGPL license.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.sigmawidgets.com/products/sigma_grid2…
License: LGPL License

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Chronoscope is an open source release of a charting and visualization platform for GWT, used as the centerpiece of Timepedia’s website. Chronoscope provides a high performance, cross browser platform for visualizing possibly large and complex datasets. It supports interactive framerates on datasets with tens of thousands of points by using multiresolution representation and incremental streaming.

When the number of points about to be plotted exceeds a certain heuristic, Chronoscope falls back to a lower resolution representation of the dataset, which can be provided by the user, or automatically calculated by various filtering algorithms. This is similar to mip-mapping techniques commonly used in 3D graphics to reduce bandwidth and decrease aliasing. It also gives non-programmers intuitive controls over almost every aspect of the look of a visualization.

Requirements: Google Web Toolkit
Demo: http://timepedia.org/chronoscope/
License: LGPL License

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Cappuccino is an open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like the desktop software users are familiar with.

Cappuccino is built on top of standard web technologies like JavaScript, and it implements most of the familiar APIs from GNUstep and Apple’s Cocoa frameworks. When you program in Cappuccino, you don’t need to concern yourself with the complexities of traditional web technologies like HTML, CSS, or even the DOM. The unpleasantries of building complex cross browser applications are abstracted away for you.

Cappuccino was implemented using a new programming language called Objective-J, which is modelled after Objective-C and built entirely on top of JavaScript. Programs written in Objective-J are interpreted in the client, so no compilation or plugins are required.

Instead of doing all or most of the work on the server, Cappuccino applications do as much as possible in the client. A typical application would never reload, but rather send and recieve data using traditional AJAX techniques and then present that data in the client code.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://cappuccino.org/
License: LGPL License

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You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

Mozilla Labs has announced the launch of Ubiquity. Ubiquity empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.) And it enables on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyubone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

Ubiquity lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the  GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license as well.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
License: GPL/MPL/LGPL Tri-License

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Are you bored with the look of youtube videos player? The Ext.ux. YoutubePlayer is a user extension that utilizes the Youtube Chromeless API. You can embed any Youtube video into Ext native controls and place it in your application wherever you want. It’s like a mediaplayer built on top of Ext JS and the Youtube API.

Ext.ux. YoutubePlayer uses Ext native components to control the video loading/playback. It’s capable of showing the buffer status and the playback slider let’s you jump to any position in the video playback. You’ll also be able to mute/unmute the video and set the overall volume. It makes the video player looks a lot nicer.

Requirements: Ext JS Framework
Demo: http://www.siteartwork.de/youtubeplayer
License: LGPL License

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GWT-Ext is a powerful widget library that provides rich widgets like Grid with sort, paging and filtering, Tree’s with Drag & Drop support, highly customizable ComboBoxes, Tab Panels, Menus & Toolbars, Dialogs, Forms and a lot more right out of the box with a powerful and easy to use API. It uses GWT and Ext.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.gwt-ext.com/demo
License: LGPL License

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Shadowbox is a cross-browser (supports Firefox 1.5+, Camino, Safari 2+, Opera 9+ and Internet Explorer 6+), cross-platform, cleanly-coded and fully-documented media viewer application written entirely in JavaScript. In other words, it is similar to lightbox but focusing on displaying different media formats, e.g. Flash, QuickTime, and Windows Media Player.

It’s easy to use Shadowbox with your JavaScript library of choice for a given project as well. Shadowbox comes bundled with adapters for Yahoo! User Interface Library, Ext (standalone), Prototype + Scriptaculous and jQuery. Using Shadowbox, website authors can display pictures and movies in all major browsers without navigating away from the linking page.

Requirements: Firefox 1.5+, Camino, Safari 2+, Opera 9+ and IE 6+
Demo: http://mjijackson.com/shadowbox
License: LGPL License

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One of the keys to getting your pages to load quicker is to make fewer HTTP requests. So, for example, if you have 6 javascript files it would be much quicker for you to join all the JavaScript together into one file and serve that instead. You can decrease the loading time further by minify your JavaScript, CSS and HTML. And also, by gzipping your page’s components and adding a far-future expires header can make your pages load faster as well.

However, doing all these manually is a pain. Aciddrop has set up a PHP script to automatically do them for you. On the test page the load time with the compressor turned on was generally below second, and without the compressor between 3-5 seconds. The Yahoo Yslow rating went from F(45) to A(97) as well.

Requirements: PHP 4+
Demo: http://aciddrop.com/2008/01/21/boost-your-website-load-time…
License: LGPL License

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