We can live without Batman, Ipod or even Starbucks coffee, but..

We can live without Batman, Ipod or even Starbucks coffee, most of us at least. But it is
not an exaggeration if I said we would not last a week without (no I am not even talking about
Simpson’s) Google or open source. These are the two best things that a man can ever ask for.
No seriously, can you spend a day without opening the Google web page? Forget a day, I bet you
cannot do for an hour. Same is the case with open source if you are programming for a living.
Recently I have launched a website and without open source it would have been impossible to
finish building it under two months. I would like to thank the authors of those open source
tools and would like to mention how I got to use them in a hope that it may help others too.

[The website is built using Java, JSP, Servlets, Hibernate, MySQL, Tomcat, Lucene technologies]

Display Tag libraries
URL: http://displaytag.sourceforge.net/11/
Display tag is jsp tag library to display data in tabular format.

CSS Star Ratings By Paul OB
URL: http://www.search-this.com/2007/05/23/css-the-star-matrix-pre-loaded/
CSS The Star Matrix is a CSS based visual rating gadget (if you will) that lets you
rate, well anything.

Captcha By Michael Connor
URL: http://www.jroller.com/mlconnor/entry/simple_captcha_jsp
I know I wanted a Captcha. But I did not even know it was called a Captcha when I started looking for it. Anyway I stumbled upon a simple captach in a JSP. You can argue all you wish about how evil writing java code in JSP. It did not matter to me. Especially when I was in time pressure.
I got this captcha working under 5 minutes.

Silver Orange Tab Menus By Daniel Burka
URL: http://labs.silverorange.com/images/tabsupdate/about.html
Being a server side programmer, I had no clue about CSS and no time to learn either.
But these tabs saved my day.

Nifty Round Cornets By Alessandro Fulciniti
http://www.html.it/articoli/nifty/index.html
I always wondered how you get those professional looking round cornered edges. These css tips
made my site more well rounded!

Toggle Script
http://www.webdeveloper.com/forum/archive/index.php/t-21673.html
This toggle script is definitely not as dandy as the ones Adobe (Spry), Yahoo (YUI) or
dojo may provide. If you have more time to invest, you may want to explore these options.

I thank many others who indirectly or directly helped me build the website.

Subbu Vedula
http://www.slinqy.com

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