During the last few years, we've published many articles related to open source projects, CMS and software:
- Top 3 Free Applications for Graphic Design in Browser
- Top 30 Free Software for Web Designers
- Start New Web Project on the Right Foot - 50 Web Development Applications And Side Tools
- Top 3 Open Source PHP CMS During 2013
In this article we will look at some of the latest and most significant projects that are changing the "landscape" with rapid speed.
All these projects deserves detailed reviews, I hope in the future I will find a time to prepare a review for each one.
Font Awesome
https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
Font Awesome gives you responsive and scalable vector icons. Excellent features and easy to customize color, size, drop shadow with simple CSS.
The current version 4.2 offer 479 icons that are divided in several categories. It is very easy to implement Font Awesome with few lines of code and one of the best thing is that JavaScript is not required.
FA can create excellent "call to action" visual appearance, improve readability of text, load quite fast and are compatible with retina displays.
Here is the link to example page with full list of icons available:
https://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/Actually, our top navigation at WebmaisterPro utilize FA too, you can see a live example on our website.
Brackets
https://brackets.io/
This editor definitely deserves more and for sure one of the best helpers for every web designer/developer.
Brackets is an open source code editor for web designers and front-end developers. Live HTML development and excellent JS debugging. The project was originally started by Adobe.
Latest version offer in-build theme support and drag-and-drop extension installation. One of the best things is that it is also available for Linux.
Bootstrap
https://getbootstrap.com/About 3 years have pass since we've mentioned Bootstrap as an upcoming trend on the pages of WebmaisterPro.
Intuitive and extremely powerful web design framework that have changed web design world. I might not be 100% accurate, but it was first developed by Twitter and implemented there.
Laravel
https://laravel.com/Probably at the moment Laravel is the most popular PHP framework. I have to admit that in the past most PHP frameworks were turning into liability, producing heavy and not so elegant code that get outdated so fast.
Laravel definitely changed the world of PHP development, based on latest version on PHP.
RESTful Routing use simple Closures to respond to requests to your application. Ships with the amazing Eloquent ORM and a great migration system. Works great on MySQL, Postgres, SQL Server, etc...
Native PHP or the light-weight Blade templating engine. Blade provides great template inheritance and is blazing fast.
AngularJS
https://angularjs.org/AngularJS is a toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development. It is fully extensible and works well with other libraries.
AngularJS lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your apps. The resulting environment is expressive, readable, and fast to develop.
This is our top 5, I know that there are many others, but without a doubt this is latest and probably most significant open source trends that rule or will rule the web and application development in the next few years.
Do you want to add another one? Please leave us a comment below!
