Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

After more than six million performed tests, Pingdom has just released version 2.0 of the Full Page Test. This new Full Page Test is still completely free to use. It still helps you profile your website’s performance. But now it’s even better.

The whole point of Full Page Test tool is to help you analyze the load speed of your websites and learn how to make them faster. With the help of this tool you can identify what about a web page is fast, slow, too big, what best practices you’re not following, and so on.

In short, it’s a free, easy-to-use tool to help webmasters and web developers everywhere optimize the performance of their websites.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://fpt.pingdom.com/
License: License Free

Either you’re a web developer, blogger or anyone with a website, you probably use Google Analytics to collect and process crucial data about your site’s visitors. Now, we got GAget for you, it is a Google Analytics Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard.

You can see the important information of the day without any clutter. You can check out the number of your visits for the last two weeks. See the rate of new visitors and bouncers. You can either refresh data with one click or wait for the automatic refresh. And it’s easy to switch between profiles too.

Requirements: Mac OS X
Demo: http://www.zoltanhosszu.com/gaget/
License: License Free

Would you like to create a template with a fullscreen grid of images and content areas? The idea is to have a Draggable Image Boxes Grid that shows boxes of thumbnails and menu like items. Once clicked, the thumbnail will expand to the full size image and the menu item box will expand to a fullscreen content area.

The main idea for this template and its effects comes from the beautiful Flash-based website of Stephen Hamilton. To make the grid draggable, they used jQuery.kinetic by Dave Taylor. The jQuery plugin allows smooth drag scrolling and it’s just what we need in our grid.

Requirements: Javascript Framework
Demo: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/DraggableImageBoxesGrid/
License: License Free

LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as varibles, mixins, operations and functions. As an extension to CSS, LESS is not only backwards compatible with CSS, but the extra features it adds use existing CSS syntax. This makes learning LESS a breeze, and if in doubt, lets you fall back to CSS.

Writing LESS is cool and lightning fast if you compare it to good old CSS and besides, it trains your thinking in solving functional problems. So far so good, but in the end the web needs a CSS file to show your website as it is. Either you embed a javascript file to live-transform your LESS-Code into CSS in your browser or you find out how to precompile your files into standard CSS.

The most powerful thing SimpLESS does: Save your *.less file and, BOOOM, SimpLESS generates a 100% valid standard CSS document out of it. No further steps, it’s that simple.

Requirements: LESS Framework
Demo: http://wearekiss.com/simpless
License: Creative Commons 3.0 License

jQuery Countdown is a jQuery plugin that sets a div or span to show a countdown to a given time. The countdown functionality can easily be added to a division with appropriate default settings, although you do need to set the target time.

You can also use images instead of text. It’s possible to count up instead of down. You can stop or pause (lap time) the countdown and resume. It supports Callbacks per tick and/or on expiry. And best of all, it supports over 40 localisations.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://keith-wood.name/countdown.html
License: GPL , MIT License

Kippt is a new and elegant way to bookmark and save notes. Kippt makes it easy to save, organize, search and read information you find on the web.

Found something awesome? You can add it to your Inbox or Read Later list and deal with it later. Organize the best stuff in to lists. You can also drag & drop links to lists. No tags, just search. Read long articles in the reader mode. There are also browser extensions to make it even easier.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://kippt.com/
License: License Free

Nowadays most developers already know how to quickly code a menu or a layout structure, but there’re always a great difficulty when coding a form, either contact, login, newsletter, comment etc.

Formee is nothing but a framework to help you develop and customize web based forms. works with the technique provided by Fluid 960 Grid System to compose the form’s layout, allowing total flexibility to put it in any website or web system.

The form has a structure built around percentage widths, thus allowing its inclusion in any project, adapting to the space available. Formee has its structural code independent of the style codes, facilitating the complete customization and manteinance of the form.

The form was built with care to preserve web standards and their semantic values, working with the smallest possible amount of tags and according to the W3C rules.

Requirements: -
Demo: http://www.formee.org/demo/
License: GPL, MIT License

Tilt represents a new way of visualizing a web page. This tool creates a 3D representation of the document, with the purpose of displaying, understanding and easily analyzing the DOM.

It will take advantage of the great tools Firefox has to offer, as it is an extension which contains a WebGL implementation, providing rich user-experience, fun interaction and useful information, while taking full advantage of 3D hardware acceleration, GLSL shaders and what OpenGL ES 2.0 has to offer.

The implementation consists of a Firefox extension containing a 3D representation of a web page, as both a fun visualization tool and a developer-friendly environment for debugging the document’s structure, contents and nesting of the DOM tree. Various information besides the actual contents will be displayed on request, regarding each node’s type, class, id, and other attributes if available. The rendering will be dynamic, in-browser, using WebGL and GLSL shaders.

Requirements: Firefox
Demo: https://github.com/victorporof/Tilt
License: Mozilla Public License

It’s hard to believe what began as couple of computers communicating through phone lines now forms the foundation for our jobs and allows even more our mothers to be bloggers. But none of this would be possible without The Web Standards Project fighting to persuade browser makers to support common standards.

Vitamin T and An Event Apart has designed a lovely infographic: A Brief History of Web Standards that looks at the past, present and future of Web Standards. Journey with us into the recent past―and who knows, what you learn may enable you to make your contribution the next major bullet point in the timeline of the Internet!

Source: http://vitamintalent.com/vitabites/a-brief-history-of-web-standards