Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

GridNavigation is another great flash component for web developers. It is a thumbnail based navigational system or a portfolio / photo gallery in a grid or pyramid like layout. You can customize the layout postion to top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right. The number of columns and rows can be set easily as well.

As you can see, GridNavigation consists of many thumbnails, they can be external images, animated SWFs or movie clips which can be defined or added through an external XML file, Component Inspector or ActionScript. The thumbnail content is clickable and zooms in to display the selected full size content while other thumbnails are pushed aside. You can even able to change the zooming and easing speed.

It is really a good way of showing your menu items, photos or images, because nowadays users are expecting more and more interactions with the website. Their experience of browsing your website can be very enjoyable and increase their chance of coming back. GridNavigation is very easy to implement like other flash components. It is currently available for ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 at the price of $44.95 – $54.95. You can view the demo of the GridNavigation here.

Mosso provides web designers and developers with reliable hosting services. Fast and reliable connections to Mosso-hosted websites are achieved because the Company has the support of Rackspace Managed Hosting, an industry leader that currently manages 30,000+ servers for customers all over the world.

To stand out from other hosting companies, Mosso offers a unique hosting solution called Hosting System. It is advanced, enterprise-level hosting technology developed by Mosso that absolutely outweighs running your own server and with less cost. With $100/month, you can enjoy the following features.

80GB Storage Space with 2,000GB Bandwidth
Mosso offers you 80GB Storage Space with unbeatable 2,000GB of monthly bandwidth. You can have as many sites, email addresses and databases as you like.

Pretty and Easy to Use Control Panel
You can setup and manage your websites easily with powerful control panel. If you provide hosting solutions to your clients, they will have their own control panel as well.

Mixture of Windows and Linux TrueHybrid Technology
You can run both Linux technology (PHP and MySQL) and Windows Technology (ASP and .NET) on the same website.

Backup Your Backups
Mosso eliminates single point of failure with RAID technology. They backup your backups and backup their backups as well. There is no need for you to worry about data lost.

To set up and get the server running at Mosso is within minutes. If you are going to provide web design and hosting solutions, you may transfer the support, tedious billing & invoicing jobs of your clients to Mosso at very competitive cost. Mosso will do all these hassle as follows for you.

24-hour Phone and Chat Support
You can choose to outsource the support service for some or all of your domains. It includes 24-hour phone and chat support for $3/month per supported domain only.

Client Billing and Invoicing
You may pick whom you would like to bill and how much you would like to charge. Mosso will collect the fees from your customers and make ACH deposit each month into your back account. It cost only $2 or 4% of the transaction.

One more interesting thing
Mosso is partnering with Native Energy, and their goals are to make their hosting operation completely carbon neutral and to invest in projects that bring more clean energy into the power grid. You can view more details on Native Energy’s website. You can’t really go wrong with Mosso, because they know what to do for mankind. 

To be honest, I am really happy with the hosting solution Mosso provides when I am writing this review. It is really tempting to switch WebAppers hosting to Mosso especially when I intend to develop some more blogs/websites soon. If I plan to join the web design business, Mosso will be one of my picks for web hosting. Much resource (manpower and money) will be saved as I would let Mosso to deal with customer support and related matters. Hoping Mosso can sponsor the hosting for WebAppers. ; )

Do you remember last time I have reviewed NoGary’s Free Highly Customizable Javascript Calendar. This time he has created a flexible and useful time picker for us.

First of all, I think the clock looks quite nice. If you do not like the current style of the clock and would like a unique look and feel for your clock, you can create a custom look for the clock yourself. You can customize the look and feel of the clock by changing the images or creating new images using the PhotoShop files included in the resource directory.

The time picker utilizes a very easy drag and drop user interface. Users can drag the minute or hour hands independently to modify the time. You do not need to click on the hands exactly, you just need to select the area nearby, and it will automatically select the nearest hand for you. So that, users can select the hands easily even if the clock is very small. There are some other configuration options you can set when initiating the time picker by passing an options object, e.g. 12/24 hours format, starting time, clock’s size, etc…

The time picker is really easy to use and implement. I think this is really handy when building a web application. Sometimes, we really need a time picker so that we can select the exact time of the exact date for an event. This time picker comes in really useful when works in parallel with the date picker. After all, this is Free, you can download it whenever you would like to use it, but remember that Mootools Framework is needed when using the time picker.

We can create animation and interactive websites easily with Adobe / Macromedia Flash. It is fast loading and it is even faster now because we are getting larger and larger bandwidth everyday. Flash is really useful and is a great choice when developing a website. That’s why Flash is really popular nowadays. However, are there any affordable Flash components we can use?

Flashloaded might be a right choice for you. Flashloaded is a division of FFF Web Media Inc which was founded in 2003. Flashloaded is based in Toronto with a team of talented developers, web designers and programmers. Their aim is to provide you the most innovative, at the same time cost effective components for Flash. SO that you can have some of the cutting-edge Flash components at a affordable price.

One of the interesting components I have found is 3DEnvironment which allows you to build 3D interactive interfaces and environment in Flash. You can have built-in depth and perspective effects create in illusion of three dimensions without the need of 3D modelling. Full keyboard and mouse support really enhanced the usability as well. The whole 3DEnvironment Package is quite nice and easy to use. You can view some of the examples I particular like as follow

Example showing an animated 3D landscape with grass and trees (Nice for an interactive adventure sites)

This shows a sample website navigation system which was created using the 3DEnvironment component. (Suitable for complex and 3D navigation sites)

This example shows an innovative way to display and zoom in on images using the 3DEnvironment component. Click on each image to zoom in. (Great for gallery sites)

You can have the whole 3DEnvironment Package for $59.95 on Flashloaded. However, do not worry. Flashloaded is very nice to give away 3 sets of 3DEnvironment Packages ($179.85 in total) to our readers. Get chances of having the excellent Flash Component Package is easy, all you need to do is complete the following sentence as usual.

I would like to use Flashloaded 3DEnvironment Package for…

I will pick 3 lucky winners on 10th Nov randomly. Thank you for all participants in advance.

Developing a fully functional and useful web application is tedious, testing the web application is more tedious. We have to make sure the web application is working well without any bugs. We have to make sure the web application is still running smooth when hundreds or thousands of people are using it at the same time. It is difficult to perform these testings without the aid of a testing software.

This paid review from ReviewMe is exactly what we need. Wapt is a load and stress testing tool that provides you with an easy-to-use, consistent and cost-effective way of testing web sites, web servers, and intranet applications with web interfaces.

Simulate Real User Activities
You can simulate real user activities by creating many different users who are coming from different IP addresses, each with their own parameters: cookies, input data for various page forms, name and password, connection speed and their own specific path through the site. You can even simulate random time between user clicks to make each virtual user as similar as possible to a human user. So that you know exactly how the server and web application react if users are using your web application.

Thousands of Users in One Test
If you want to simulate thousands of users, you do not need to specify separate behavior for each of them. You specify behavior for each type of users and use as many virtual users of each type as you need. It makes you really easy to test the web application with thousands of users easily.

Extras
There are other useful features for example, you can perform testing on dynamic web applications, test the HTTP requests that include parameters that are specific for each user. WAPT also supports testing of web sites and applications secured by SSL. You do not need to perform any additional actions for the testing.

Descriptive Test Reports and Graphs
And finally, WAPT displays test results through descriptive reports and graphs. They are available even during the test, so you can monitor key parameters of web application performance on the fly and see how your site responds to the increasing load volume. You can also save test results in MS Excel compatible format which is really handy.

30-day Trail Version
WAPT is designed for Microsoft Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP. It costs $350 for 1 unit, you can get cheaper price if you order more than 2 units. I suggest you download 30-day trial version first. Once you are think the product is right for you, you can buy it afterwards. I personally found it very useful, you will really need it if you are going to build a web application for large amount of users.

It is difficult to find a well-developed calendar component for our web applications. NoGray has developed a free and highly customizable Javascript calendar component for web developers like us. The look and feel of the calendar can be changed easily using CSS. You can have more than one calendar on any page, create any number of months per calendar. You can also enable multi selection of date as well. The calendar looks really and very easy to integrate into your websites.

If you found the calendar does not suit your needs, you can spend some money and ask them to customize it for you. And also there are some other useful and free Javascript tools for webmasters, I particular like the Free Color Picker as well.

Web Application is getting more and more popular recently. They can be really useful because it can be accessed everywhere in the world with internet access. If you have an idea, do not know how to build it? NoGray might be able to help you. It is a small web design and development firm. They specialized in creating well-developed web applications for customers.

NoGray focuses on 3 simple steps when working with clients. They will design the homepage and main template for the website which gives the client a clear perspective on how it will look like first. While the development, they will create a easy to use content management system to ensure clients can update or make changes to the application easily afterwards. After all, they will also submit your website to major search engines without you worrying about the SEO stuff.

You know where to go if you need someone to help on your website or web application projects. ; )

Requirements: XHTML Doctype
Demo: http://nogray.com/calendar.php
License: License Free

TNX.net is a relative new but awesome text link ads system for both advertisers and publishers. The system seems working really well as it trades over 25.000.000 text link ads per month. Despite of the fact that TNX.net is completely free to join, which has attracted more than 24,000 webmasters using the system already.

For Publishers
Webmasters can sell your text link ads through TNX.net as well. It will calculate ratings of each page for you and give you TNX-Points when a link is sold. You have full control to block new text link ads purchase at any time. So that you can avoid irrelevant text link ads appear on your site. After you have gained some TNX-Points, you can either use these points to purchase links from other websites, you can actually sell your TNX-Points to TNX.net Network at any time. Current rate is $0.61 for 1000 points and it will grow by 2% every week. You can also earn 12.5% commission of your referrer earned.

For Advertisers
TNX.net allows advertisers purchasing non-reciprocal links from thousands of relevant websites. Instead of purchasing site-wide text link ads, TNX.net allows advertisers select any single page you want to locate your ads at. Or you just need to select the sum of text link ads, they will be placed on websites with selected PageRank, number of Yahoo backlinks on selected category automatically. The price of purchasing 1000 inbound links only cost you $1.14 at the moment which is quite bargain I think.

User Interface and Security
The user interface is very good which is really easy to use. You can mange both advertiser and publisher accounts easily on one single account. And also, TNX.net claimed that there is no more than 4 text link ads are placed on each page by default, it does not look like a link farm, therefore there is no risk to get banned or penalised by search engines.

Try it now
TNX.net network is now offering us 2,000 TNX – Points on every new accounts. And they will credit you 5,000 TNX-Points free of charge after your website is approved. You can read more details on http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=477444. Feel free to ask them questions if needed, I am sure they are happy to help you out.

Requirements: No Requirements
Demo: Sign Up Now
License: License Free