A programming language is just one tool in a developer’s expansive collection of specialty software and hardware.  So does it really matter which programming language a developer uses, as long as he or she is meeting customer requirements on time and within budget?

Yes, yes it does.  Ford or Chevy.  Stihl or Husky.  Coke or Pepsi.  Let’s face it, we all get passionate about our tools.

Most Popular?

There are a number of ways to measure the popularity of a programming language, for example, based on the number of:

• New applications written in the language
• Existing applications written in the language
• Developers that use the language primarily
• Developers that use the language ever
• Web searches
• Available jobs that require skills in the language
• Developers’ favorites

The following surveys attempt to rank which programming languages are most popular, each using a different measure:

Tiobe.com

Tiobe is a popular site for ranking programming languages.  Tiobe bases its rankings on world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.  Rankings are not about the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code have been written.  Tiobe uses Google, MSN and Yahoo! search engines to measure the Web “chatter” and hence the popularity of each programming language.  The Tiobe top 11 for May 2007 are:

1. Java – 19.1%
2. C – 15.2%
3. C++ – 10.1%
4. PHP – 8.7%
5. Visual Basic – 8.4%
6. Perl – 6.2%
7. Python – 3.8%
8. C# – 3.7%
9. JavaScript – 3.1%
10. Ruby – 2.6%
11. Delphi – 2.1%

Dice.com

A September 2006 eWeek article ranks programming languages based on nationwide queries on Dice.com, a job site for technology professionals.  Following are percentage of jobs listed on Dice.com that require skills in each programming language:

1. Java – 35.7%
2. C, C++ – 15.3%
3. C# – 12.7%
4. Perl – 11.9%
5. JavaScript – 10.9%
6. Visual Basic .NET – 5.2%
7. PHP – 2.9%
8. Ajax – 2.7%
9. Python – 2.0%
10. Ruby – 0.7%

Evans Data

Evans Data Corporation conducted a Winter 2006 developer survey that ranks programming languages based on how many developers use that language at least some of the time:

1. Java – 45%
2. C, C++ – 40%
3. C# – 32%
4. Ajax – 28%
5. Visual Basic & VB.NET – 21%

Computerworld

In early 2005, Computerworld conducted a developer survey that measured which programming languages are in use by the developer’s company:

1. C# – 72%
2. Java – 66%
3. Visual Basic – 62%
4. C++ – 54%
5. JavaScript – 50%
6. Unix Shell Scripts – 42%
7. Perl – 34%
8. C – 32%
9. PHP – 16%
10. Python – 8%
11. Delphi – 7%
12. TCL – 6%
13. Ruby – 1%

Source: http://www.devtopics.com/

Styling Lists

The Amazing - With a little CSS, the  becomes one of the most powerful and versatile tags in a web designer’s arsenal. This article is a tutorial and a tribute to the amazing .

Better Ordered Lists (Using Simple PHP and CSS)- Here is an example where you ditch the traditional ordered list and create your own!

Style Your Ordered List- Here is a quick CSS tutorial on how you can use the ordered list <ol> and paragraph <p> element to design a stylish numbered list.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

List Based Calendar- A simple way to add multiple views to a calendar, so you can view your events in a simple list, or in a month based calendar format.

• Live DemoView it Here

Forms and Form Elements

Datasheet-style form using HTML and CSS- Make a datasheet-style web form using HTML, CSS and JavaScript with multiple similar records,

Styling File Inputs with CSS and the Dom - File inputs (<input type=”file” />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

Better Web Forms: Redesigning eBay’s Registration- Is a detailed walkthrough of simple changes that have a dramatic positive impact.

Uni-Form- Uni-Form is an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, “modularize” it, so even people with only basic knowledge of these technologies can get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms

Footers

A CSS sticky footer that just works- In just a few simple CSS classes with minimal extra HTML markup, you can get a sticky footer that even beginners can get a handle on. It’s been tested in IE 5 and up, Firefox, Safari and Opera.

MAKING YOUR FOOTER STAY PUT WITH CSS- How to make your footer dock to the bottom of the screen.

New ideas for Image Replacement

Create Custom Search Bars - With Image Replacement using CSS

HR Image Replacement with CSS- How to replace the HR tag with an image that works cross browser.

Image Sprite

Image Sprite Navigation With CSS- Creating a navigation using an image sprite, you can have a complete navigation, rollovers and all, by only using one image.

CSS image techniques

Create Resizable Images With CSS- A new technique to resize images when the user increases their browser’s text size. Images are resized along with the text rather than staying constant in size.

CSS Stamps- Using the CSS property border and outline to achieve the stamp look.

Image Captions Generated with CSS and JavaScript- The names are not part of the image – they are stored in the img’s title attribute.

Cross-browser semi-transparent backgrounds- Semi-transparent backgrounds are nice. They would be more popular, but Internet Explorer doesn’t support .png transparency. There are a few clunky workarounds. Here’s another that’s a little less clunky.

CSS Rollovers- Learn how to create a simple rollover image using CSS.

Text and Links Effects

“Checkmark” Your Visited Links with Pure CSS- The goal of this tutorial is to get a check mark preceding visited links for a nice visual indicator.

Simple Round CSS Links - Now you can style both (a) and (button) in this super easy and light-weight solution

Pure CSS Popups- Using pure CSS causing text to appear and disappear.

Navigation

Perfect pagination style using CSS- This tutorial explains how to design a pagination for search results or more in general to split a long list of records in more pages.

VISTA style toolbar- How to create VISTA style toolbar with CSS,

• Live Demoview it Here
• Download codefrom Here

Digg-like navigation bar using CSS- This tutorial explains how to design a digg-like navigation bar using a liquid design with rounded corners for links.

Menu circular en CSS- A circular menu with nice hover effect showing text description for each item in the menu.

• Live Demoview it Here

Further readings on Navigation

4 Reasons to Use CSS-Based Navigation- By using CSS to create a navigational menu you can achieve both accessibility and a professional, attractive appearance. Vandelay Design listed the benefits of using CSS for navigational menus, Worth reading.

CSS Image Galleries

CSS Image Gallery- A purely CSS based image gallery that displays larger versions of thumbnail images dynamically when the mouse hovers over them. A rich HTML caption can be added to the enlarged image.

Not so simple photograph gallery- A CSS image gallery that have a default image, a line or two of descriptive text and the ability to click an image to hold it on the screen.

A sliding list click gallery- A demonstration to show a sliding tabs gallery, with a click to open action rather than a hover. Also the facility to add some descriptive text to accompany the large image.

Drop Caps

Nice Drop caps with CSS- Using the :first-letter pseudo-element, you can easily create nice drop caps with CSS. No extra HTML or Javascript required and IE5+ browser support.

• Live DemoView it Here

Drop Caps- This small snippet of CSS utilises the :first-letter pseudo class to apply a particluar style to the first letter of each paragraph, giving the look of an illuminated initial.

• Download codefrom Here

Rounded Corners in a simple New approach

3 Simple Steps in Coding a Rounded Corners Layout- A simple approach to coding fixed width, rounded corners layout in 3 simple steps.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

One pixel notched corners- as used by Google Analytics.

• Live DemoView it Here

Auto-Cropping Rounded Corners- A new solution for rounded corners, what it does is: it crops the content below it, so that anything with a background color or image (headers, paragraphs, even images) automatically get the rounded corner treatment with no extra work.

• Download Examplefrom Here

Blockquotes

Simple Double Quotes- This CSS tutorial will show you how to display two double-quote images using one blockquote tag.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

Blockquotes with Image Quotes- Adding an image to the blockquote style.

Worth Checking

Pure CSS Animated Progress Bar- A simple demonstration of how you can create animated progress bar using pure css. The trick is very simple. We need 3 elements, one container and 2 nested elements.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

Add a “loading” icon to your larger images- Using CSS to embed a “loading” image, to let visitors know that an image is loading.

The CSS Text Wrapper - The CSS Text Wrapper allows you to easily make HTML text wrap in shapes other than just a rectangle. You can make text wrap around curves, zig-zags, or whatever you want.

• Live DemoView it Here

Adding a magnifier to images with CSS and JavaScript

SAC Simple Accessible Charts.

Cross-browser transparent columns- How to create transparent columns that can work in all browsers. By using the opacity property and still having the content opaque. Floats work too – which makes it possible to create multi-column transparent-column layouts.

• Live DemoView it Here
• Download zip file

A Cool CSS Effect – Dashboard [Updated x2]- A very simple tutorial on how to create an attractive dashboard-like dimmer for your webpage and draw your user’s attention to a certain object. Very cool web effect.

Text-Shadow Exposed- Make cool and clever text effects with css text-shadow.

CSS Speech Bubbles- Easy to customize speech bubbles coded in CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 STRICT.

• Download zip file

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface- Cameron Moll’s first series of articles after three years looks to have been well worth the wait. Introducing “The Highly Extensible CSS Interface”, a four-part series of how-to’s and savvy conversation. Code samples are available for viewing and downloading with each article.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

1) Sexy Sliding Menu – Andrew Sellick decided to use mootools due to the smoothness of their effects, however, he developed a sliding menu using script.aculo.us .

Demo: Mootols Version
Demo: Script.aculo.usVersion

2) FastFind Menu Script – This script allows for nested menus, based on dynamic “AJAX” responses. The menu can also be dragged/dropped thanks to the jQuery Interface Library.

Demo: FastFind Menu

3) Webber 2.0 Dock Menu – Great example of a dock type navigation.

Demo: Webber 2.0 Dock Menu

4) Phatfusion- Image Menu – Image menu using javascript, onClick event keeps selected item open and to close it again.

Demo: Phatfusion- Image Menu
Demo: Mootools version with XML parser

5) Drag and Drop ordering in a TreePanel – This example shows basic drag and drop node moving in a tree. In this implementation there are no restrictions and anything can be dropped anywhere except appending to nodes marked “leaf” (the files).

Demo: Drag and Drop ordering in a TreePanel

6) Custom Menu Events This is a combination of animation and custom events where Think Vitamin team show us how menu items sliding into view and firing off subscribable events using Yahoo! UI.One-time effect that shows off the menu opening up and firing an event.

Demo: Custom Menu Events | ThinkVitamin.com

7) Context Menu Functionality This is a combination of animation and custom events where Think Vitamin team show us how menu items sliding into view and firing off subscribable events using Yahoo! UI.

Demo: Context Menu Functionality

Another demo was suggested by one of our commentators Daniel Niquet:
Another Context Menu

8 ) LavaLamp jQuery Sliding Menu It is a jQuery sliding nifty effect menu with light weight code and extra two more interface styles. This effect was originally written by Guillermo Rauch using mootools javascript library.

Demo: LavaLamp jQuery Sliding Menu
Demo: Mootools Fancy Menu

9 ) Slashdot Menu- Dynamic DriveThis is a stylish collapsible menu modelled after the navigational menu found on Slashdot.

Demo: Slashdot Menu

10 ) Mootools menu with Accordeon and EffectsThis cool menu has a neat effect by hovering over the links, and opens a 2 level submenu with an accordeon.

Demo: Mootools menu with Accordeon and Effects

11 ) CSS Dock MenuIf you are a big Mac fan, you will love this CSS dock menu that Nick La designed. It is using Jquery Javascript library and Fisheye component from Interface and some of their icons.

Demo: CSS Dock Menu

12 ) jQuery Plugin: Sliding Menu- A very simple sliding menu using the effects provided by the Interface plugin.

Demo: jQuery Plugin: Sliding Menu

13 ) Accessible expanding and collapsing menu

Demo: Accessible expanding and collapsing menu

Web-developers can create amazing menus with Javascript and CSS. AJAX makes it possible to create more interactive, more responsive and more flexible navigation to any website. If you guys have an awesome Ajax/CSS menu that you think its should be added to the list, don’t hesitate to let me know and a link to your site will be added beside any amazing menu you find intersting.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

Thanks to AJAX, we can provide real-time feedback to our users using server-side validation scripts and eliminate the need for redundant validation functions and processing data.

Let’s take a look, hopefully you’ll find new ideas you can develop further on your own.

Styling Forms

Demo

Styling Form Elements

Demo :

Form Usability and Accessibility

Demo :

Fancy Demo :

Ajax Forms Processing

Demo :

Demo :

Demo :

Awesome Form Validation

Demo :

Demo :

Form Field Hints

22) Validation Hints for your form – This article will explain one way of achieving Validation Hints effect while the user type using JavaScript and CSS.

Hide Form Fields

Demo :

Great Tips for Creating Forms

A Must See Examples

Demo:

Demo :

Tutorials

39) Password strength meter for your register form – A small tutorial on how to build a password strength meter like the one on Google’s new account form.

Demo :

Online Form Builder

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

Sliding Panels

1) Sliding Panels For jQuery – Element can start open or closed and will be toggled from their own original position.

Menu

3) LavaLamp

Tabs

6) jQuery UI Tabs / Tabs 3 – Simple jQuery based tab-navigation

Accordion

8 ) jQuery Accordion

Demo

SlideShows

10) jQZoom- allows you to realize a small magnifier window close to the image or images on your web page easily.

11) Image/Photo Gallery Viewer- allows you to take a grouping of images and turn it into an flash-like image/photo gallery. It allows you to style it how ever you want and add as many images at you want.

Transition Effects

12) InnerFade – It’s designed to fade you any element inside a container in and out.

jQuery Carousel

16) Riding carousels with jQuery – is a jQuery plugin for controlling a list of items in horizontal or vertical order.

Demo :

Color Picker

17) Farbtastic – is a jQuery plug-in that can add one or more color picker widgets into a page through JavaScript.

Demo :

LightBox

19) jQuery ThickBox – is a webpage user interface dialog widget written in JavaScript.

Demo :

Demo :

21) jQuery lightBox Plugin – simple, elegant, unobtrusive, no need extra markup and is used to overlay images on the current page through the power and flexibility of jQuery´s selector.

Demo :

iframe

22) JQuery iFrame Plugin – If javascript is turned off, it will just show a link to the content. Here is the code in action…

Form Validation

23) Validation – A fairly comprehensive set of form validation rules. The plugin also dynamically creates IDs and ties them to labels when they are missing.

Demo :

24) Ajax Form Validation – Client side validation in a form using jQuery. The username will check with the server whether the chosen name is a) valid and b) available.

Demo :

Form Elements

26) jquery.Combobox – is an unobtrusive way of creating a HTML type combobox from a existing HTML Select element(s), a Demo is here.

28) File Style Plugin for jQuery -File Style plugin enables you to use image as browse button. You can also style filename field as normal textfield using css.

Star Rating

30)Half-Star Rating Plugin

ToolTips

31) Tooltip Plugin Examples – A fancy tooltip with some custom positioning, a tooltip with an extra class for nice shadows, and some extra content. You can find a demo here.

Tables Plugins

33) Zebra Tables Demo -using jQuery to do zebra striping and row hovering, very NICE!!

Demo :

34) Table Sorter Plugin - for turning a standard HTML table with THEAD and TBODY tags into a sortable table without page refreshes. It can successfully parse and sort many types of data including linked data in a cell.

36) Scrollable HTML table plugin- used to convert tables in ordinary HTML into scrollable ones. No additional coding is necessary.

Demo :

Draggable Droppables And Selectables

37) Sortables - You won’t believe how easy this code to make it easy to sort several lists, mix and match the lists, and send the information to a database.

Style Switcher

39) Switch stylesheets with jQuery- allows your visitors to choose which stylesheet they would like to view your site with. It uses cookies so that when they return to the site or visit a different page they still get their chosen stylesheet. A Demo is here.

Rounded Corners

40) jQuery Corner Demo

Must See jQuery Examples

42) jQuery Air – A passenger management interface for charter flights. A great Tutorial that you will enjoy.

Demo :

43) HeatColor -allows you to assign colors to elements, based on a value derived from that element. The derived value is compared to a range of values, it can find the min and max values of the desired elements, or you can pass them in manually.

Demo :

44) Simple jQuery Examples -This page contains a growing set of Query powered script examples in “pagemod” format. The code that is displayed when clicking “Source” is exactly the same Javascript code that powers each example. Feel free to save a copy of this page and use the example.

Demo :

47) 3-Column Splitter Layout -this is a 3-column layout using nested splitters. The left and right columns are a semi-fixed width; the center column grows or shrinks. Page scroll bars have been removed since all the content is inside the splitter, and the splitter is anchored to the bottom of the window using an onresize event handler.

51) JQuery BlockUI Plugin -lets you simulate synchronous behavior when using AJAX, without locking the browser. When activated, it will prevent user activity with the page (or part of the page) until it is deactivated. BlockUI adds elements to the DOM to give it both the appearance and behavior of blocking user interaction.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

The list below is made up of the best 20 FREE PHP Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure. Give them a try.

1. Charts

pChart is a PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Most of todays chart libraries have a cost, our project is intended to be free. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries, CSV files, or manually provided. This project is still under development and new features or fix are made every week. Focus has been put on rendering quality introducing an aliasing algorithm to draw eye candy graphics. Rendering speed has been dramatically enhanced since the first version, we’ll still continue optimising the code!

2. PHP components: Autosuggest

PHP component ready to use to implement a search form with an autosuggest feature using PHP and MySQL.

3. Animated Ajax Record Deletion Using MooTools

If you are a huge fan of WordPress’ method of individual article deletion where you click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here’s how to achieve that functionality with MooTools javascript.

if(isset($_GET['delete']))
{
	$query = 'DELETE FROM my_table WHERE item_id = '.(int)$_GET['delete'];
	$result = mysql_query($result,$link);
}

4. Sanitize and Validate Data with PHP Filters

Data validation is an integral part of working with forms. Not only can invalid submitted data lead to security problems, but it can also break your webpage. In this tutorial we’ll take a look at how to remove illegal characters and validate data by using the “filter_var” function.

5. How to Build a Login System for a Simple Website

In this tutorial you will learn how to build a login system with PHP and MYSQL. Many, many features will be covered; including MySqli, Prepared Statements, jQuery, Classes, Sessions, Cookies, etc.

6. Building Your First Simple CMS

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a simple PHP class that will:

• Create a database
• Connect to a database
• Display a form with two fields
• Save the form data in the database
• Display the saved data from the database

7. HOW-TO: Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery

If you are a regular at Reddit, you must have noticed the way people vote there. You can either vote up or vote down. Pretty interesting, huh? This tutorial will show you how to create such a voting system with jQuery, PHP and MySQL.

Check out the demo here

8. Easy Pagination with PHP and Mootools

This is a PHP Page class that handles the database queries, generating ajax page navigation and even creates the Javascript for you.

Check out the demo here

9. Caching Dynamic PHP pages easily

Looking for a solution to cache heavy pages and just serve a static html version for a little while now, and here is a solution in output buffering.

Check out the demo here

10. Directory trees with php and jquery

A simple way to keep track of many files is to use a directory tree. A directory tree lists out files and directories so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. In this tutorial, we will create a directory tree using PHP and jQuery.

Check out the demo here

11. jQuery – PHP & Ajax with the Twitter API

Learn how you can use jQuery, PHP and a little ajax to connect up to the Twitter API and return results. When you load your HTML it will call the javascript function getSearch() to return Twitter Search API results every 30 seconds.

12. How to Make a Password Strength Meter Like Google

Password strength meters are becoming more and more popular amongst web services. Google uses one when creating a Google account. Here is how to create one yourself.

Check out the demo here

13. Backup Your Database into an XML File Using PHP

Backing up data is extremely important. Most of the time the database is the most important piece of the puzzle. Imagine losing all of the data in your database — it would be tragic. Here’s a PHP snippet that outputs your database as XML. Here is how the output will look like.

<database name="my_database">
	<table name="wp_comments">
		<columns>
			<column name="comment_ID" blob="0" maxlength="" multiple_key="0" not_null="1" numeric="1" primary_key="1" table="wp_comments" type="int" default="" unique_key="0" unsigned="1" zerofill="0" />
			<column name="comment_post_ID" blob="0" maxlength="" multiple_key="1" not_null="1" numeric="1" primary_key="0" table="wp_comments" type="int" default="" unique_key="0" unsigned="0" zerofill="0" />

Check out the demo here

14. Add Custom Google Search Results to Your Site with PHP

Learn how to integrate a custom google search results on your site, and style it to your liking.

15. Send Hassle Free and Dependable HTML Emails With PHP

A simple straightforward function that sends HTML e-mails with a plain text counterpart for those over 80 and still using AOL 2.5.

16. How to Validate Forms in both sides using PHP and jQuery

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to validate your forms using PHP and jQuery in both sides: client side (using javascript with jQuery) and server side (using PHP). It will be interesting to see how to use regular expressions to validate different kind of e-mails, passwords and more.

Check out the demo here

17. Create a shoutbox using PHP and AJAX (with jQuery)

how to create a dynamic ajax based shoutbox with jQuery from scratch. It will be very interesting to know how to use the ajax function of jQuery and how it can be used to insert and recover data from a MySQL database via PHP in a way asynchronous.

Check out the demo here

18. 3 ways to compress CSS files using PHP

When you’re using a sophisticated design, CSS files can quickly become very long, and takes time to load. Here are 3 interresting ways of compressing CSS files by using PHP.

19. Smart Image Resizer

The major advantage of this script is that it allows you to resize and crop any image on my website without touching the actual image or writing any code.

20. PHP Contact Form Script

This contact form will return a validation message if the message was sent succesfully. It will also display an error message if you try to send an empty message or if the e-mail is invalid.

Check out the demo here

21. PHP & jQuery image upload and crop v1.2

This PHP script will allow you to upload a JPG image, resize it if required then crop it to given height and width.

Source: http://www.noupe.com/

With several JavaScript frameworks available, jQuery is quickly becoming a favorite. If you are interested in using jQuery for animated effects, here are 13 excellent tutorials to get you on your way.

Building an Animated Cartoon Robot with jQuery

Animate a hover with jQuery

How To Create A ‘Mootools Homepage’ Inspired Navigation Effect Using jQuery

CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time

Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery

Learning jQuery: Revealing Photo Slider

Learning jQuery: Fading Menu – Replacing Content

Using jQuery for Background Image Animations

Animated Menus Using jQuery

Create a Cool Animated Navigation with CSS and jQuery

Animated Drop Down Menu with jQuery

jQuery Tutorials for Designers

How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery

Source: http://webdesignledger.com/

1. CSS Grid Builder

CSS Grid Builder is an online GUI for customizing the YUI Grids CSS – a lightweight CSS framework developed by Yahoo! that comes with over 1000 page layout combinations. The CSS Grid Builder allows you to rapidly generate a CSS-based, web-standards compliant page layout in a matter of minutes (or even seconds). Once you’ve got the page layout the way you want it, all you have to do is press “Show Code” and it generates the HTML for you.

You don’t even have to host the CSS file on your web server (saving you some bandwidth and maintenance hassles), the generated code links to the appropriate stylesheet found on Yahoo!’s Developer Network API.

2. CSS Sprite Generator

Using CSS sprites is an excellent way to improve web page performance by reducing the number of HTTP requests needed for rendering images, but it can take a lot of planning, measuring, and coding if done manually.

CSS Sprite Generator allows you to upload all of your images (you have to place them in a .zip file first) and it will combine the uploaded images into a single sprite and also generate the CSS for you.

3. Blueprint: A CSS Framework

Blueprint reduces the amount of CSS code you have to write by including common styles that developers typically use such CSS reset and page layouts. A demonstration of a web page that uses Blueprint can be found here.

4. CSSTidy

CSSTidy is an open source application that parses, fixes, and optimizes CSS code to reduce file size and also to standardize CSS code formatting automatically. It also finds and removes redundant styles and properties. You can adjust CSSTidy’s settings to your preferred compression level but even the default setting can often give you 30% compression according to the creators of CSSTidy. Check out the “before and after” examples to get a feel for how CSSTidy works.

5. logicss: CSS Framework

logicss is a collection of CSS files and PHP utilities aimed at reducing web development time. It allows developers to create customizable fixed, elastic, or fluid (liquid) layout grids. Check out the preview of their CSS code generation tool.

6. layouts

___layouts is a very simple CSS framework that can be used to create web-standards compliant page layouts. ___layouts was inspired by Yahoo!’s Grids CSS and offers 5 preset widths that supports fluid-width or fixed-width layouts. Much like Yahoo!’s Grid.css, ___layouts also has a web-based Layout Builder that was developed for the Firefox browser. Caution: the Layout Builder is still in its early stages of development, so things may be buggy at times.

7. Clean AJAX

Clean AJAX speeds up Ajax development by cutting down the amount of code you have to write (and rewrite), giving you access to common and proven design patterns used in Ajax applications. Clean AJAX can be used with any server-side technology such as PHP, RoR, and .NET because it’s JavaScript-based. Check out the demo page so you can see Clean AJAX in action.

8. Sajax

Sajax (which stands for “Simple Ajax Toolkit”) is an open source framework developed to speed up the creation of Ajax applications. It supports major sever-side technologies such as ASP, Cold Fusion, PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby. Sajax has a fairly large community of over 39,000 registered users on their forums – so if you run into any troubles while developing a Sajax-based application or if you want to showcase your work, you’ll be sure to have an audience.

9. DOMTool

DOMTool was created to cut down the time it takes to code DOM structures. Creating DOM statements is as simple as copying your HTML code into the DOMTool and then clicking a button. It’s not meant to be used as a simple copy-and-paste solution and you should verify and optimize the output, but it gives you a great starting point.

10. JavaScript Code Improver

JavaScript Code Improver is a simple, no-frills application that allows you to quickly tidy up and format your JavaScript. It’s a great way for a team of developers to standardize JavaScript code format for easier readability and collaboration.

11. JSUnit

JSUnit is a unit testing framework for JavaScript. Testing JavaScript manually is time-consuming and prone to errors, but JSUnit provides the developer a simpler, automated way of doing unit tests to ensure thorough testing at a fraction of the time it would take to test manually. JSUnit allows for the execution of automated tests for multiple browsers and operating systems.

12. Test plugin for JavaScriptMVC

The Test plugin for JavaScriptMVC is another excellent JavaScript testing framework to help make development speedier. It was created with the concept of “JavaScript testing sucks… so we want to make it easier” in mind. The Test plugin is a comprehensive set of utilities allowing you to do unit tests as well as simulate user interaction that can occur in a web page.

13. Venkman: JavaScript Debugger

Venkman is a JavaScript debugging environment for Firefox 2, Netscape, and Seamonkey. It gives you a GUI for stepping through JavaScript code and setting break points. It also comes with a command-line interface built in. Venkman is an extension that you can easily install and download through the Firefox Add-ons section of Mozilla.org.

14. Firebug

Firebug is a Mozilla Firefox extension that gives you plenty of web development tools and features. Firebug has a built-in JavaScript debugger that lets you step through your script as well as allowing you to perform benchmarks to see why your script is slow/sluggish.

You can quickly hunt down CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and XML errors through Firebug, and it even allows you to filter and search for specific errors. Another handy feature is the DOM inspector pane which outlines a web page’s structure; very handy if you’re working on a big website or an open-source application that you’ve recently gotten involved with. It’s an awesome tool though I find that disabling Firebug when I’m not using it is helpful in speeding up normal browsing (such accessing Gmail, for example).

15. Web Developer extension for Firefox

Web Developer extension is a very handy and time-saving extension for Firefox. I’ve written and recommended it plenty of times and is an extension that I use daily. You can rapidly validate your XHTML, find JavaScript/CSS errors, visualize a web page’s structure, quickly fill out web forms for testing purposes, clear your cache with a shortcut key, change XHTML on-the-fly (great for working remotely on a web design), inspect HTTP headers information, and much more.

16. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Even if you prefer Firefox (or Safari) to develop and test your web pages, you have to test your stuff in the Internet Explorer browser for cross-compatibility. Whenever I test in IE, there are plenty of times when I wish certain features in Firebug and the Web Developer extension are accessible through IE, such as the DOM inspector option or the CSS Information option. IE Developer Toolbar is the IE add-on that provides me the features I like in my Firefox extensions.

17. Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

The Yahoo! Design Pattern Library is a large collection of proven optimal web design patterns to save you time in creating highly-sophisticated design solutions. Some things that you can find in the Design Pattern Library are: breadcrumb navigation, auto-complete for web forms, and drag-and-drop solutions. It speeds up development by offering solutions to common design needs so that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

18. Test Everything

Test Everything is a web-based application for multi-purpose testing, reducing the time it takes you to use online services and validators. Test Everything is an aggregate of over 100 tools reduced to just one web page. You can validate your XHTML for web standards and accessibility, test your design in several browsers (using the Browsershots service), check page rank, and more – all in one location.

19. Pingdom Tools

Pingdom Tools is web-based application that you can use for easily testing the performance of your web pages. It can give you information on the total loading time of a web page and the total number of objects required to render the page to give you insights on things you can leave out or combine. It gives you a visualization of how page objects are loaded and you can sort the results by load order, load time (helpful in seeing what’s taking so long to load), file size, file type, and URL.

20. Aptana Studio Community Edition

Aptana Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) designed for Ajax-based applications. It has JavaScript debugging, an Ajax and JavaScript library that includes some popular frameworks (such as the Dojo Toolkit) syntax colorizing, HTML/CSS/JavaScript code assistance (auto-complete and tool tips) and much more. It makes Ajax development simpler and gives the developer time-saving ways of organizing and managing multiple projects.

Some more tools

• Google Web Toolkit: write high-performance Ajax applications quickly using Java and the compiled output is highly-optimized JavaScript files.
• Cuzillion: quickly construct web pages to see how page objects interact so that you may explore techniques on how to improve web page performance.
• CSSFly: edit web pages on-the-fly through a web browser. Helpful in debugging and testing a web page.
• AppJet: a web-based solution that allows you to create a functional web application or widget through a GUI.
• Google Sitemap Generator: Quickly generate a sitemap file based on the Sitemap XML protocol without you having to write it yourself.

Source: http://sixrevisions.com/

Here, you’ll find the top 6 free IE extensions for web developers.

Where appropriate (and available), you’ll also find related resources, their download page, and documentation.

1. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar, developed by Microsoft, offers several features and options to aid web development and design.

It shares many features that we love from Chris Pederick’s Firefox Web Developer extension such as: outline div elements, mark-up validation tools, ruler and measuring tools, resizing the browser window precisely (i.e. to 800×600), and all that good stuff.

It’s an essential tool for analyzing and troubleshooting web pages.

Some features:

• A Document Object Model inspector pane
• Multiple validation – automatically opens validation services in multiple browser tabs at the same time
• Syntax coloring of source code

Related Resources:

• “Using Microsoft IE Developer Toolbar” by Arkady Lesniara
• “15 Seconds: An Introduction to the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar” by John Peterson

Download:

• IE Developer Toolbar on Microsoft Developer Center

2. Web Accessibility Toolbar

The Web Accessibility Toolbar, developed by Vision Australia, was designed specifically to assess and analyze the accessibility of a web page, but it’s very useful regardless of whether you’re testing for accessibility or not.

Some features:

• Greyscale function – renders pages into grayscale so that you can test color contrast.
• Color Contrast Analyzer - a more detailed test for color blindness accessibility, which provides an analysis of the foreground and background color for “color visibility” as suggested by the W3C consortium.
• Test Styles – which opens up a dialog box where you can edit existing CSS styles on a web page.

Related resources:

• “Using the Web Accessibility Toolbar” on webcredible: user research & design
• “Using the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar” on WebAim: Web Accessibility in Mind

Download:

• Web Accessibility Toolbar from Vision Australia

Documentation:

• Toolbar Functions

3. HttpWatch (Basic Edition)

HttpWatch is an HTTP data viewer and debugger extension by Simtech Limited. HttpWatch comes in two editions: Basic and Professional.

The Basic edition displays plenty of information regarding HTTP data and web page performance such as status codes, total elapsed time it takes a web page to load, amount of downloaded data, and HTTP compression savings (if you use data compression).

Some features:

• Page Level Time Chart – gives you a visual representation of the web page’s performance
• Errors Log Summary - notifies you of any HTTP errors encountered.

Download:

• HttpWatch from HttpWatch official website

Documentation:

• HttpWatch Features Summary

4. WebCollect

WebCollect is a simple web content capture tool. It allows you to take and save screenshots easily (great tool for design mock-ups and presentation). It also has an eyedropper tool which allows you to sample colors from a web page to extract their color values (in RGB, Dec, and Hex).

Some features:

• Copy full screen – enabling you to copy a web page without having to crop or resize the image
• Capture Rectangle Area – which allows you to copy just parts of a web page.
• Support for most digital image file types such as JPG, PNG, and GIF.

Download:

• WebCollect Toolbar 3.2 from CNET Download.com

5. Fiddler2

Fiddler2 is a web debugging proxy add-on whichs logs HTTP(S) traffic data. It’s very robust in features and is customizable to your needs.

Some features:

• Session Inspector – which also provides you with headers and web forms data.
• Set break-points – so that you can experiment with inbound/outbound data.
• Performance Statistics – including world-wide estimated download times

Related resources:

• “Performance Tuning with Fiddler” on MSDN.
• FiddlerScript Editor – allows you to edit script rules on fiddler.

Downloads:

• Fiddler2 from offical website
• Microsoft .NET framework (required)

6. Web Development Helper

The Web Developer Helper is an IE extension targeted towards ASP.NET and JavaScript/Ajax Developers. It has a special set of tools for ASP.NET development.

Some features:

• Trap script errors – to see call stack errors.
• Detailed request headers

Downloads:

• Web Dev Helper from CodePlex – this page also contains the PDF documentation file for the Web Developer Helper
• Microsoft .NET framework (required)

IE still can’t match the Firefox’s number of extensions for web developers but these extensions help even out the field a little bit.

Got any interesting experiences with any of these tools (or horror stories)? Share it with us in the comment section.

Source: http://sixrevisions.com/

About a couple of months ago, I wrote an article about it entitled “9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension” and I’d like to follow up on that by showcasing even more things you can do with the Firefox Web Developer extension.

1. Determine server information of a website.

Ever wondered what your favorite website uses for their server technology? If so, you can quickly view the website’s HTTP response headers by using “Information > View Response Headers“.

The following example shows Digg’s response headers:

We can see in the above example that Digg uses an Apache server and PHP 5. Additionally (at least for the page I tested) they served compressed files (gzip).

Heading over to Microsoft’s homepage, we can see that they – in turn – use an IIS 7.0 server and the ASP.NET framework:

2. Use a “magnifying glass” to zoom into parts of a web page.

You can use the “Miscellaneous> Display Page Magnifier” option to get a window that allows you to zoom in and out of the desired areas of a web page.

Tip: As a shortcut, you can use the scroll button of your mouse to increase or decrease the level of magnification.

Here’s a sample from People’s magazine using the Page Magnifier tool.

3. View a website’s color palette.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a visual representation of all the colors used by a website (not including images) You can use the “Information > View Color Information” option of the Firefox Web Developer extension, which will open a new tab displaying Color Information.

Here’s Mozilla.org’s color scheme:

4. Preview the “Print” and “Mobile” version of a website.

Some websites choose to include a print version or mobile version for their content by providing an alternate stylesheet like so: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="myprint.css" media="print" />.

If you’d like to preview how a website will look when printed or when viewed using a mobile device, use the “CSS > Display CSS by Media Type > Print” or “CSS > Display CSS by Media Type > Handheld” option of the Firefox Web Developer toolbar.

The example below shows A List Apart’s normal stylesheet and print stylesheet.

Normal stylesheet:

Print stylesheet:

The print stylesheet takes out the logo and the primary navigation.

5. See the dimensions of all images.

You can see all image dimensions on a web page by using Firefox Web Developer extension’s “Images > Display Image Dimensions” option. You can see this option in action below (using GameSpot’s home page).

From the above picture, we can what the dimensions of the images in pixel units (we can also see that they’re using a 1×1 px spacer, interesting).

6. See the sizes of block elements.

A quick way to debug layout issues pertaining to spacing is to use the “Information > Display Block Size” option of the Web Developer extension to see if something is adding unintended padding and margins to your block elements. Block elements include div’s and forms as well as elements with the display:block attribute.

Here’s an example of the option turned on for Yahoo!’s home page.

7. See if your page degrades nicely without CSS and do a simple accessibility test.

A key design feature that a website must have so that it can be viewed by the most amount of people is that it must look decent and readable with CSS turned off.

You can turn off all styles by using the “CSS > Disable Styles > All Styles” option. This also allows you (somewhat – and shouldn’t be a replacement to real accessibility testing) to see if your website is accessible via assistive technologies (you can see how the document flows and if you’re displaying important information).

For a very crude and quick accessibility test, you should also turn off all images and replace it with their alt tags by using the Images > Replace Images With Alt Attribute option.

Here’s the normal StumbleUpon home page.

Here it is without any styles:

You can see that the logo is an image replacement so that screen readers can still use the logo as a “home” link and read the name of the site.

We can also see that the mark-up complies with current web standards, putting the primary navigation in a list, and the page title “Welcome to StumbleUpon” enclosed in a header <h#> tag.

8. Quickly find CSS errors on a page.

The Web Developer extension indicates if a page has CSS errors in the rightmost part of the toolbar as shown below.

By clicking on the button, the Error Console pops-up, listing all the errors of the page. If there aren’t any errors, you’ll see a button instead of a button.

9. Never forget to put alt and title attributes in your images and links ever again.

I like adding lots of images in my articles because it breaks the monotony of my long-winded writing style. This does, however, lead to me forgetting (or neglecting) alt and title attributes quite often.

A quick method I use to double-check my work is by using the Images > Display Image Attributes option and the Information > Display Title Attributes option.

Here’s a screenshot from flickr that showcases the Display Image Attributes option.

And there they are, some more of my favorite Firefox Web Developer options. If you’ve never used it, try it out by downloading it from Mozilla’s Web Developer Firefox Add-ons page.

What are your favorite options? Let us know via the comment section on this page.

Source: http://sixrevisions.com/