With the latest discussions on Flash (whether it is dying or will become more powerful), here is an interesting project that Flash and HTML developers may both find useful:

Frontal is an intuitive markup and scripting language that generates Flash and enables you to create interactive content, sites or apps. with a few lines of code.

It can embed and work seamlessly with HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, Ajax or any other web technology and supports deep linking.

For Flash Developers

It definitely adds value to the development process with:

• decreasing the development time by building more with less code
• reviewing designs in real-time
• creating fluid layouts
• updating and reusing the code easier

For HTML Developers

It is a language that will help you build Flash (almost) without learning something new.

Geolocation is one of the most popular subjects for today's web & there are many solutions that help geo-enabling web applications.

YQL Geo Library is an impressive resource for geolocation as it is totally free & JavaScript-based.

It has various powerful features like:

• detecting the visitor’s location with the W3C geo API and with IP as a fallback
• find geo location from text
• find location from lat/lon pair
• find locations in a certain web document (by URL)
• get the location for a certain IP number

The library is lightweight (4kb uncompressed) & non-complicated. It just works by calling a function like:

yqlgeo.get('217.12.14.240',function(o){
  alert(o.place.name + ',' + o.place.country.content +
        ' (' + o.place.centroid.latitude + ',' +
               o.place.centroid.longitude + ')'
        );
});

will get you the city, country, latitude & longitude of any given IP.

Simile Widgets is a set of open source web widgets for visualizing data & content.

They are actually a spin-off from the Simile Project & improved over time by a community of open-source developers.

Currently, it includes 4 widgets:

Timeline

Timeline is for creating an interactive display of events within a timeframe.

It can be dragged or controlled with the mouse wheel & events can be clicked to see the details.

Timeplot

Timeplot is a DHTML widget for plotting time series easily.

On mouse-overs, it can display the values interactively (it works with the same data format that Timeline supports).

Runway

Runway is a Flash-based implementation of the popular iTunes-like coverflow.

The colors, fonts, reflection & transit,in values can be configured easily. Also, it can fire events to update the web page's Javascript.

Exhibit

It is for creating web pages with advanced text search and filtering functionalities, with interactive maps, timelines, & other visualizations.

You can find more details on a previously published WRD post on Exhibit.

EZ-CSS is a lightweight (only 1kb) CSS framework for easily creating table-less layouts.

The framework enables you to create multiple columns of any width, with or without gutters of any width.

EZ-CSS is very flexible:

• each module or layout contains a width-less container which prevents rounding issues or rounding errors.
• it creates self-clearing containers which means every box will contain floats.

As EZ-CSS has a very small footprint, it can be fully inserted into any stylesheet or a style element which would make it compatible with every other CSS framework too.

Sypex Dumper is an open source web application for creating instant or automated backups of MySQL databases.

It is built with PHP, has an Ajaxed interface & can restore databases as well.

The application can work with gb-level huge databases as it easily bypasses the timeout limits of PHP by pausing/starting backup jobs.

Sypex Dumper can optionally check, optimize & repair tables or automatically delete older backups to save space.

It has support for file compression (Gzip and Bzip2) & offers a multilingual interface.

WebApp.Net is a feature-rich JavaScript framework for building mobile web applications.

It provides a complete set of components (switch buttons, radio groups, etc.) that will help your website look & behave like a native mobile application.

The framework has full support for Ajax & every action from clicks to form submissions can be Ajaxed with tiny declarations.

Other features of WebApp.Net:

• native fullscreen for iPhone & iPod Touch
• custom events
• advanced styling for components
• progressive loading (objects will be loaded only when they are needed)
• animated PNGs
• & more..

The framework is still in beta but it is promising. A detailed documentation helps understanding it better & the demo shows its capabilities.

JQuery Roundabout is an impressive plugin that converts HTML elements into highly-customizable & interactive turntable-like (and more) interfaces.

By default, it works with ordered/un-ordered lists but with a little configuration it can convert any nested HTML structure.

The plugin has a bunch of options for maximum customization like:

• optional starting element
• speed of the animations
• opacity & scale of objects
• ability to trigger animations from any element
• disabling clicks
• & more..

With the help of a complimentary plugin, named Roundabout Shapes, it is possible create too many different types of interfaces.

jQuery Roundabout can have have various uses from displaying images to creating form interfaces, animations, etc.

CSScaffold is a PHP-powered CSS framework which will improve the development time by extending the CSS language.

A great thing about the framework is, "it is written exactly like CSS", so, no need to learn a new syntax.

How it works?

CSScaffold sits in your CSS directory, & uses .htaccess files to automatically pass any CSS file through itself first for processing/caching which all happens in the background.

Some Features:

Like mentioned, CSScaffold improves the language itself. This happens by making the usage of:

• constants
• mixins
• nested Selectors
• expressions
• caching and gzipping

possible.

It has a plugin architecture which makes adding new features possible & easier.

JoobsBox is an open source job board application which is built with PHP (Zend Framework) & MySQL.

No membership is required to add new job listings & they can be posted under pre-defined categories.

It comes with a plugin system which makes it possible to extend the application easily. There are already several plugins like iPhone plugin or the Twitter plugin (auto-posts the listings to Twitter).

The application offers an admin panel where all the categories, listings, plugins & other variables can be controlled.

JoobsBox is multilingual & themeable. The project is currently in alpha stage, not mature but promising.

Open Atrium is an open source web application for creating an intranet where co-workers/teams can collaborate easily.

It is built on the Drupal framework & has modules like:

• blogs for each group
• event calendar which can import feeds from iCal & others
• documents, to store, collaborate & see revisions
• Twitter-like shoutbox for sharing any info
• case tracker which is a complete ticketing system to manage projects & assign tasks
• group dashboard to see what’s going on

Open Atrium can be extended with new features by creating new modules.

The application is multilingual & requires PHP & MySQL to run (like Drupal).