CSS3 tools

CSS tools can save a lot of a time and frustration when working on a layout, as they can automatically generate some of the tedious code for you, and help you improve your productivity. With the advent of CSS3, there are also now some CSS3 tools and also some CSS3 generators that can create gradients for you, as well as provide WYSIWYG visuals. Most of us are visual learners, and even though hand coding is preferred for work, it helps to be able to see and learn what various CSS properties do.

In this post, you’ll find 10 productivity enhancing CSS tools and generators, as well as some CSS3 tools as well.

Useful collection. See also the previous CSS-related links

CSS buttons

Useful framework for CSS buttons

CSS grids

Grid generators for CSS - a great list

About HTML5

A useful collection of resources:

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - free book from O'Reilly
Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - free book from O'Reilly
HTML5 tests for mobile

/via Geo Messages - innovative HTML5 mobile web mashups.

Java forums

It is better late than never. Our Forum servlet supports CSS configuration.

Generators

55 generators for web designers. Repetitve tasks such as creating a looping background or styling a basic CSS menu etc. that actually works

Draw figures in CSS

How to create circles in your JSP pages - Circles taglib

Useful bookmarklets

Useful bookmarklets for developers: image info, CSS processing, translation, QR codes, YouTube video etc.

HTML5 frameworks

A framework is basically software application which assists developers to quickly design and develop dynamic websites - a great collection of HTML5-CSS frameworks

For iPad publishers

Treesaver is JavaScript framework for creating magazine-style layouts using standards-compliant HTML and CSS. Looks great!

Outlook taglib

A long time bug with CSS "features" of IE caused problems with Outlook taglib has been fixed. So you are welcome to check out the updated version:

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Resources in web applications

A couple of components let you unpack resources in your web applications on the fly. The main idea is to pack various resources (images, css and js files) together with your code and extract data on the fly. Could be useful for example when you distribute application on the USB and your application should be up and running without installation – everything will be packed in one file.

Resource servlet lets you pickup resources (getResourceAsStream) from CLASSPATH and Unzip servlet lets you directly extract data from zip (jar) file. For example:

1. Pack your images (directory /pic) in file myfile.jar
2. Describe servlet and mapping:

Alternatively, you can define path via mapping. Set zip (jar) file as an initial parameter and define mapping for files you need to unzip:

<servlet>
<servlet-name>Unzip</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.jsos.unzip.UnzipServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>file</param-name>
<param-value>/WEB-INF/myfile.jar</param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Unzip</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/pic/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

And now in your JSP files you can write so for example:

<img src="http://your_host/pic/a.gif"/>

file a.gif will be extracted on the fly

HTML to PDF

WebKit based Open Source utility lets you convert HTML to PDF with full CSS support: WKHTMLTOPDF

How to server static content

From a performance perspective, the trouble with cookies is that once the server sets a cookie for a particular domain, all subsequent HTTP requests for that domain must include the cookie. Even if the server has no use for the cookie, as is usually the case with static components, the cookie is sent over the wire anyway, bloating our request headers with useless code.

So serving static content (e.g. images, css etc.) from a cookieless domain is a standard performance best practice. See more details here.

And JSOS provides several components lets you share your content across several servers. See for example: Load balance and Moved permanently servlets.

Free web development books

Free web development books from Google: CSS, HTML, XHTML, DHTML, Actioscript, Javascript, Ajax, Perl, Ruby, MooTools, jQuery, Firefox, iPhone.

Barcode in JSP

New Year - new components. See Barcode taglib in our suite:

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the big plus here that it is a pure CSS solution.