When Chris and I first started working on GitHub in late 2007, we split the work into two parts. Chris worked on the Rails app and I worked on Grit, the first ever Git bindings for Ruby. After six months of development, Grit had become complete enough to power GitHub during our public launch of the site and we were faced with an interesting question:Should we open source Grit or keep it proprietary?Keeping it private would provide a higher hurdle for competing Ruby-based Git hosting sites, giving us an advantage. Open sourcing it would mean thousands of people worldwide could use it to build i...

I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons. 11.04 dropped me into the new “Unity” GNOME interface. There may be people in the world for whom Unity is a good idea, but none of them are me. The look is garish and ugly, and it takes twice as many clicks as it did before to get to an application through their supposedly “friendly” interface as it did in GNOME Classic. No, dammit, I do not want to text-search my applications to call one up!But the real crash landing was when I found out that the Unity dock wonâ€�...

Google JS Test is a JavaScript unit testing framework that runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine, the same open source project that is responsible for Google Chrome’s super-fast JS execution speed. Google JS Test is used internally by several Google projects, and we’re pleased to announce that it has been released as an open source project.Features of Google JS Test include:Extremely fast startup and execution time, without needing to run a browser.Clean, readable output in the case of both passing and failing tests.An optional browser-based test runner that can simply be re...

A chat application allows users to communicate with others via texting, messaging, video and audio conferencing. While developing a web application web masters always think that they should communicate with their audience directly rather than emails, phone or contact forms, or chat applications can be used in various web applications such as social networking sites, business sites for live support etc.We understand the needs of webmasters and that’s why we searched and explored myriad of Google’s pages to find out these 5 free open source chat applications, webmasters can us...

This post illustrates five interesting rich text editors ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some guidelines regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML code. Try them!1. Yahoo! UI Library: Rich Text EditorThe Yahoo! Rich Text Editor is a UI control that replaces a standard HTML textarea and is based on Yahoo! UI Library; it allows for the rich formatting of text content, including common structural treatments like lists, formatting treatments like bold and italic text, and drag-and-drop inclusion and sizing of images.Implement this editor in your web...

Here the dump of my ultimate collection of online Web development resources and directory, oriented for the Front-End user Interface (UI). HTML5 and all related open standards are moving fast, but for now, building a whole Website/WebApp on top of that can be very inconsistent, especially across various browsers experiences. So… how to embrace new awesome web technologies ? Now, as Web Developers and Designers, we have to build on top of more stable framework. It’s here that come JavaScript jQuery, acting like interface into browser’s implementations. That how we can ...

IBM announced Maqetta, an HTML5 authoring tool for building desktop and mobile user interfaces, and also announced the contribution of the open-source technology to the Dojo Foundation.LAS VEGAS – At the IBM Impact 2011 conference here, IBM announced both Maqetta as well as the open-source contribution of its Maqetta HTML5 visual authoring tool to the Dojo Foundation.Maqetta is an open-source project that provides WYSIWYG visual authoring of HTML5 user interfaces using drag-and-drop assembly, and supports both desktop and mobile user interfaces. The Maqetta application itself is authore...