Web Development Toolbox: 60+ Free jQuery Plugins, Tools, and Web Applications

In web development, you cannot have enough tools and plugins in your toolbox. There is a plethora of development platforms, methods and technologies surfacing every day. Consequently, we can see new trends in web development – from large portal to single-page websites and from web applications to tiny browser applications. For this reason, every web developer has to have the latest tools in his arsenal.

Thanks to the every expanding repository of open source resources, that web development today has become rapid and efficient. Web developers have access to an unlimited treasure of free tools, libraries, applications, and plugins that they can use in their web development projects.

In this post, we are sharing a comprehensive web development toolbox that contains 60+ free jQuery plugins, tools and web applications. These free plugins and applications will help your accelerate your development time and build your web applications on popular and tested resources.

Vanillabox – Lightbox-Like Free jQuery Plugin

Vanillabox is a free, simple and modern Lightbox-like jQuery plugin. You can easily setup your image gallery with this plugin.

jInvertScroll – Free jQuery Horizontal Parallax Plugin

jInvertScroll is a free jQuery plugin that allows you to move in horizontal with a parallax effect while scrolling down.It’s easy to setup and requires nearly no configuration.

FFForm: Free jQuery Contact Form Plugin

The ‘Contact’ form on your website is like your door to rest of the world in the cyberspace. It is the easiest way for website visitors to drop a line and start the conversation. FFForm is a simple and free jQuery plugin that can be integrated in any website layout to provide a fully functional contact form. Built with jQuery and CSS, FFForm is compatible with all modern web browsers and mobile devices. It also provides various customization options including animations, field validation and notifications.

Makes Sentences Easily Tweetable for Your Users

jQuery.tweetable.js makes sentences and snippets easily tweetable for your users. That will grab all elements with the data-tweetable attribute and create clickable links out of them. If the attribute in question has a value (e.g. data-tweetable=’I love lamp’), the tweet’s text will be set to that value.

The links are unstyled by default, but those links also are created with a given class (by default tweetable) so you can style them to your heart’s content.

HideShare – Free jQuery Plugin for Social Sharing

HideShare is a free social sharing plugin that inserts social sharing links. Allows for sharing of current page with the option for sharing any link or image. Requires that Font-Awesome fonts and CSS be installed.

Yadcf – Yet Another DataTables Column Filter

Yadcf is a free jQuery plugin that allows the user to easily add filter components to table columns, the plugin works on top of the DataTables jQuery plugin.

Horizontal Scrolling With Parallax – jInvertScroll

jInvertScroll is a free jQuery plugin that manipulates the default scrolling behavior and forces a horizontal scroll.

This free plugin is lightweight (<1kb) and works with almost no setup. Adding a specific class to wrapper elements and calling a JS function i senough. It also eases creating parallax effects with the onScroll callback where we can decide to animate any element.

Ion.Sound – Free jQuery Plugin for Playing Sounds

Ion.Sound is a free jQuery plugin for playing sounds on events. Ion.Sound is free to use and has cross-browser support. It includes 15 free sounds.

Trip.js – Free jQuery Tutorial Trip Plugin

Trip.js is a free jQuery plugin that can help you customize a tutorial trip easily with more flexibility.

menuSlider – Free jQuery Menu Slider

menuSlider is free jQuery menu slider plugin that creates the slider over the menu items. It’s easy to use and create menus with slide animation effect.

Loadie.js – Lightweight jQuery Loader Plugin

Loadie.js is a free jQuery plugin to create a preloader that doesn’t suck.

A Stable Framework For Sending HTTP Requests With PHP – Guzzle

Guzzle, a cURL wrapper, makes this function even much better with added features. Using this framework, we can send parallel + persistent connections and make use of plugins for caching, OAuth, AWS integration and more.

udraggable.js : jQuery plugin to make elements draggable by mouse or touch

This free plugin provides an API similar to jQueryUI’s draggable but with support for unified mouse and touch events. It aims to provide a minimum useful subset rather than attempting to clone the full range of behaviours supported by jQueryUI. However, some of the limitations can be worked around quite simply.

CircleType.js – Free jQuery Plugin for Circular Text

Circletype.js is a free jQuery plugin that lets you set type on a circle

Salvattore – jQuery Masonry Alternative with CSS-Driven Configuration

Salvattore is a jQuery Masonry alternative with CSS-driven configuration. It creates HTML elements depending on the number of columns you specify. Each of the items of your container is placed on these columns by turn. To get started simply add a data-columns attribute to the container.

Open Weather : Free jQuery API for Current Weather

A simple, lightweight, and free jQuery plugin used to display the current weather of any city using the free OpenWeatherMap API. This plugin allows you to display the location, the current temperature, the current low temperature, the current high temperature, a description of the current weather, a weather icon, the humidity level, the wind speed, the time the sun will rise, and the time the sun will set.

Tabslet : A free jQuery plugin for Tabs with Extra Features

Yet another jQuery plugin for tabs with some extra features.

nanoGALLERY : Free jQuery Image Gallery Plugin

Image gallery for jQuery is a powerful and easy to use image gallery with support for pulling in Flickr and Picasa/Google+ photo albums as well. Mobile-friendly and responsive. Smooth in/out transitions. Images are shown as clickable thumbnails, which will expand to full view via a modal popup window. Support custom themes.

nthMaster – Master The “:nth-child” CSS Selector Quickly

nthMaster presents various usage scenarios of: nth-child simply, visually and with a basic description. These include targeting a specific element, a range, negative range, nth-of-type usage and more.

Let Visitors Control Your Site with Voice Commands

Annyang is a tiny JavaScript library that lets your visitors control your site with voice commands. Annyang has no dependencies, weighs less than 1kb, and is free to use and modify. It plays nicely with all browsers, progressively enhancing browsers that support SpeechRecognition, while leaving users with older browsers unaffected.

Glide.js: Free, Responsive & Touch Friendly jQuery Slider

Glide.js is a free, responsive and touch-friendly jQuery slider. Based on CSS3 transitions with fallback to older browsers. It’s simple, lightweight and fast. Designed to slide, no less, no more. It works on smartphones, tablets and desktops. It supports Swipe event, Arrows and bullets navigation, Keyboard navigation, Public API with callbacks, Autoplay and Pause on hover. It is released under MIT License.

Animo.js: Powerful Tool for Managing CSS Animations

Animo.js is a powerful tool for managing CSS animations. It includes features like Stack animations, create cross-browser blurring, set callbacks on animation completion. Animo includes the amazing animate.css library by Dan Eden, which provides you with nearly 60 beautiful animations from attention seekers to entrances and exits. He has also added a few helper animations to the library.

FormBuilder.js – An Interface For Creating Form Builders

FormBuilder.js is a client-side (HTML-CSS-JavaScript) resource for creating such form builders. It provides the interface that supports inserting input types and re-ordering them with drag ‘n’ drops.

Impressive Online File Converter With An API: CloudConvert

CloudConvert is a pretty amazing and free online file conversion service that is compatible with 140+ file types. It supports almost all video + audio file types, compression formats, images and more. Also, the service has an API which enables you to integrate such conversion features to any app.

Free Mac App For Delivering Previews To iOS & Android Devices – Skala Preview

Skala Preview is a free Mac application with free iOS and Android apps that makes this process a joy. The application instantly sends lossless and colour-accurate previews to mobile and they can be zoomed, tested for color blindness and viewed in any orientation.

Kint – A Debugging Helper For PHP Apps

Kint, an open source resource, is a zero-setup replacement that offers a better debugging experience. It smartly detects the type of data being dumped displays tailored alternatives to otherwise hardly readable data.

Filtering, Sorting And Paging Tables With JavaScript – Dable

Dable is a free JavaScript library for improving the functionality of standard HTML tables. The library is capable of adding filtering, sorting and paging features to any table (or, table-like views can be generated from JavaScript arrays).

It is standalone, cross-browser compatible and can be styled (already has multiple themes -including Bootstrap.

A simple notification jQuery/Zepto library designed to be used in mobile apps

Blacklisting unwanted words

blacklist.js is the simple free jQuery plugin for blacklisting unwanted words.

FSEditor – jQuery Fullscreen Editor

A free jQuery plugin that prettifies and transforms text fields into fullscreen text editors with two different transition options.

Hybrid textbox + selectbox – Useful for tagging

Selectize is the hybrid of a textbox and <select> box. It’s jQuery-based and it’s useful for tagging, contact lists, country selectors, and so on.

Cross platform, jQuery based UI toolkit

jKit is a cross platform, jQuery based UI toolkit. Put jQuery and jKit on all your pages and HTML becomes so much better. And the best thing? You really don’t have to be a programmer to create a truly amazing website!

Detect Image Dimensions Easily — image-size

image-size is a Node module for detecting the size of an image. image-size supports PNG, GIF, JPEG, PSD and BMP files. It offers a convenient way for detecting if, for example, a user has submitted a picture too large or too small (like for Facebook cover photos). image-size is also very easy to use.

Convert Anything to Anything — CloudConvert

CloudConvert is a web app for converting… anything to anything. CloudConvert can convert, for example, PDFs to Word documents; *.wmv files to *.avi; Kindle files to PDFs; etc. It’s definitely an “all-in-one” application that will find its use everywhere. It also features a convenient API that allows using the app’s services from any of your web apps.

A Free Web Debugging Proxy — Fiddler

Fiddler is a web debugging tool for catching any oddities in and generally optimizing HTTP requests. Fiddler works with any system and any browser and offers a convenient way of monitoring traffic, taking care of buggy requests, decrypting HTTPS web sessions and much more. It uses .NET and is built with an extendable architecture.

Test Websites in Different Screen Resolutions — Screenfly

Screenfly is a web application for testing websites in different screen resolutions. It provides countless presets for television, mobile, desktop and custom screen sizes.

Screenfly offers an easy way of checking how your website looks and acts at different screen resolutions. Take a look at other tools in Screenfly’s menu, such as Retro – a user agent and screen size detector – as well as Wires, a tool for building wireframes in the browser.

Lorem Ipsum for People — Random User Generator

Random User Generator is an API that generates random persons. Random User Generator’s API returns a full user profile, including a user picture, a password, address, etc. Developers can request the data of up to 5 persons at once. It’s great to use in designs where Lorem Ipsum just won’t cut it. The faces are handpicked from GregPC‘s 1000 faces project.

Design Responsive Websites Online — Webflow

Webflow is a web application for designing responsive websites. Webflow is pretty handy for handling the most modern principles of design, such as versioning, responsive design, customizing, etc. Webflow sports numerous useful features — custom forms, web fonts, a responsive grid, etc. — and can be safely called one of the best web-based website editors.

Cloud printing online resource for developers

Lob is a cloud printing online resource for developers. Users can send a HTTP request with printing parameters and Lob everything from letters to posters. Not only this best quality printing can be done on high-end industrial equipment and can be delivered to any part of the world. It is free to use except for printing which is chargeable.

WhatTheFont

WhatTheFont is an online service that analyzes uploaded images and returns the font style matching the font used in the image. This is a tool that web designers would love as it gives immense range of fonts (similar to the one that is in the image uploaded) available in the database of WhatTheFont.

Typewonder

Typewonder is a tool that helps you test various web fonts available and make your pick by checking which one suits your website. Open the website, enter your website url in the box provided and within no time you will be able to see the fonts that you can choose from. Isn’t it the fuss-free way of choosing the right fonts for your website?

Color Wheel

Color Wheel is a free online web service that lets designer give wings to their creative talent. Designers can pick various colors as per the need of the hour for their particular projects explore various themes too.

Collaborate on a project easily with Skwibl

Skwibl is a common space for designers and clients to collaborate on a project. If you are a designer then you can get to enjoy simple project management for your images and videos. Besides, your clients can mark specific places on an image or a video frame to simplify your communication. The best thing is that the interactions are in real time to make the interaction easy.

Bootstrap Magic

Bootstrap themes generator featuring Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS. It lets you easily create your own Twitter Bootstrap theme bedsides enabling you to update your variables, change it with a smooth colorpicker and get instant result. With features like awesome typeahead, contextual and live preview, new and imported variables acceptability and cool colorpicker, it has become the choice of millions.

Prototypo – Online, open-source font generator

Protoypo is a free, online, open-source font generator that is anticipated to be released soon. enabling designers tweak the font’s glyphs within more than twenty parameters. Also, classic or experimental shapes can be designed with ease as one can shift from the prototyping phase where almost anything can be adjusted at once for fine-tuning each glyph within the typeface.

UpdraftPlus – WordPress backup and restoration tool

UpdraftPlus is a free WordPress backup and restoration tool that simplifies backups and restoration. From Dropbox, Google Drive to Rackspace Cloud, DreamObjects, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and email backup and restoration can be done can with a single click.

Tiff – A type diff tool

Tiff is a type diff tool that visually contrasts the differences between two fonts. As of now it supports fonts from the Google Web Fonts library and any system fonts. It would be highly suggestive that you should use it in the latest version of modern day browsers you use.

Bjango Actions – Photoshop Actions and Automator Workflows for iOS & Android

Koala – A GUI Application for LESS, Sass, Compass and CoffeeScript compilation

Cheerio – jQuery Designed Specifically for the Server

Flipload JS Component

LESS Hat – A bunch of smart LESS mixins

Why LESS Hat? We were searching for LESS mixins library that we could use in CSS Hat plugin for exporting Photoshop layer styles into CSS.

Flexbox playground and code generator

Premailer – Pre-flight for HTML email

YARD – Documentation generation tool for the Ruby programming language

YARD is a documentation generation tool for the Ruby programming language. It enables the user to generate consistent, usable documentation that can be? exported to a number of formats very easily, and also supports extending for custom Ruby constructs such as custom class level definitions. Above is a highlight of the some of YARD’s notable features.

Docker

Docker is an open-source project to easily create lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale, in production, on VMs, bare metal, OpenStack clusters, public clouds and more.

Aristochart – Line charting library for canvas

Aristochart is highly customizable and flexible line charting library for canvas. Aristochart allows you to focus on aesthetic while it manages the data behind the scenes.

dna.js Template Cloner – DOM Templating Engine for jQuery

dns.js Template Cloner is a JavaScript templating engine to dynamically build DOM elements from data supplied by JSON objects.

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