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Archive for the ‘Tools’ Category

Community Engine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.

Social Network Plugin

Features of this social network plugin:

  • Authentication (sign up, log in)
  • User profiles
  • User search
  • Blogs with tagging, categories and rich text editing
  • Photo uploading and tagging
  • “Clippings” - visual bookmarks
  • Commenting and comment notification by e-mail (Blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings can be commented)
  • Forums
  • Friendships and activity feeds
  • Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
  • And more!

Most of the developers use cookies for storing data on the client side as they are cross browser & platform. But storing important data in cookies has some downsides:

  • Size: Cookie max size is around 4kb.
  • Bandwidth: Cookies are used in every HTTP transaction.
  • Complexity: It is hard to manipulate cookies correctly.

Modern web browsers, Google & Flash have non-cookie storage solutions but each of them solved this differently:

  • globalStorage: Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 8
  • localStorage: development WebKit
  • openDatabase: Safari 3.1+
  • userdata behavior: Internet Explorer 5.5+
  • Adobe Flash
  • Google Gears

PersistJS solves all of the issues above. It currently supports persistent client-side storage through the following backends:

  • flash: Flash 8 persistent storage.
  • gears: Google Gears-based persistent storage.
  • localstorage: HTML5 draft storage.
  • whatwg_db: HTML5 draft database storage.
  • globalstorage: HTML5 draft storage (old spec).
  • ie: Internet Explorer userdata behaviors.
  • cookie: Cookie-based persistent storage.

And the great news is, each backend is communicated with the same interface which means you don’t have to know or care which backend is being used.

AtMail Open Source is an open source webmail client written in PHP.

This lightweight Ajaxed webmail client has a simple to use interface and can be used with existing IMAP mailservers.

Free Webmail Client

Features of this free webmail client:

  • Lightweight Ajax Webmail Interface
  • Video Mail
  • PHP source code
  • IMAP support
  • Live Spell Check
  • Address Book
  • Tags:
  • Filed under: Extras, Other License, Tools
  • 2 Comments
  • John Resig (the creator of jQuery) has created a pure JavaScript HTML parser that can definitely be very handy.

    As more HTML code is inserted and formatted inside JavaScript tags, this parser can save serious development time with automating the process.

    Some examples:

    • Unclosed Tags: HTMLtoXML("<p><b>Hello") == '<p><b>Hello</b></p>'
    • Empty Elements: HTMLtoXML("<img src=test.jpg>") == '<img src="test.jpg"/>'
    • Attributes Without Values: HTMLtoXML("<input disabled>") == '<input disabled="disabled"/>'

    HTML is a language with lots of tricks and the parser may fail in some cases but it will work in most of them and will become better by time for sure.

    Developers generally neglect JavaScript testing because there’s really nothing out there that let’s you simulate user interactions easily.  Here comes the Test plugin (Thanks to Brian Moschel from JavaScriptMVC for suggesting this resource).

    It lets you simulate every major DOM event, as well as some combination events like Write and Drag, and then run functional and unit tests in a separate console window.

    JavaScript Test

    Test plugin saves serious development time with features like using sample data to simulating AJAX functionality, writing text or dragging an element.

    Here is a sample test function:

    test_check : function() {
        // simulate clicking the checkbox
        // params has the todo element
        var params = this.TodoCheckClick();
        // assert the color change occurs as expected
        this.assert_equal("#808080", params.element.parentNode.style.color);
    },
    test_uncheck : function() {
        // click the checkbox again to uncheck it
        var params = this.TodoCheckClick();
        // assert the color change goes away
        this.assert_equal(”, params.element.parentNode.style.color);
    },

  • Tags:
  • Filed under: Extras, Other License, Tools
  • 1 Comment
  • There are projects which I’m using Subversion and some that I don’t. There are also other things which are very valuable to me like bookmarks, code snippets & more.

    And every designer, developer, for sure, lost a few days work because of not backing up the files regularly.

    I have started using Mozy Online Backup Free version as a backup solution for my dev. files in general. It provides 2GB space for free, very easy to configure, can take scheduled backups and works silently.

    Mozy Online Backup

    It is an impressive product as it totally reduces the risk of losing data. And works both in Windows and Mac.

    There are also other versions of Mozy:

    P.S. This post is an advertorial (and I really like the product :) ).

    This is an exciting project which helps creating portable, hidden source coded, both online and offline PHP applications.

    Roadsend PHP is an open source implementation of the PHP language.

    It has a compiler that generates native binaries (no interpreter required) and all source files can be compiled in 1 executable file.

    Using Roadsend Compiler, you can:

    • Create online web applications with Fast/CGI
    • Offline web applications with an embedded web server (MicroServer)
    • Desktop GUI applications with PHP-GTK, and console applications.

    Roadsend PHP Compiler

    Once the files are compiled with this PHP compiler, it is close to impossible to return back to the original code. This is a great feature for hiding the source code.

    And for easier development & testing, Roadsend has a powerful built-in debugger.

  • Tags:
  • Filed under: Extras, GPL License, Tools
  • 2 Comments
  • Snipplr is a website where you can store / share your code snippets and find the ones that are already shared by other users.

    It is great to find real-world working code examples with an organized interface which saves a lot of time.

    Snipplr covers almost every language from ASP, ASP.NET, PHP to Ruby, Django or AS3.

    Web Developer Codes

    A feature I like is seeing the codes shared by a specific user (nice feature for following users whose coding style is much familiar to you).

    Snipplr is absolutely a must-bookmark for a developer.

    Texter is a simple but effective Windows application running in the system tray and doing a very simple job: replacing abbreviations with the phrases you define.


    Let’s say you use XHTML frequently and you define an abbreviation like "divmake" and press "tab" (you can define the hotkey) and it can produce you:

    <div class=""></div>

    as an example.

    You can use it for anything like generating your signature on-the-fly or any other frequently typed text.

    When a website visitor faces a JavaScript error, they may not realize it or even they realize it only few of them may inform you about the problem. And you may never find out the problem if someone does not warn you.

    DamnIT, built with JavaScriptMVC framework, is a great free service which notifies you when a JavaScript error occurs in your websites via e-mail.

    JavaScript Error Reporting

    How to use this JavaScript error reporting service?

    • Sign up with DamnIT
    • Insert the JavaScript code provided to your webpages
    • Configure the service from your membership area.

    Optionally, DamnIT can be configured to provide an interface for your visitors to enter a feedback about the error.

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