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Droptiles

Metro style Live Tiles enabled Web 2.0 Dashboard

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Droptiles screenshot

Introduction

Droptiles is an Open Source Windows 8 Start like Metro style Web 2.0 Dashboard. It builds the experience using Tiles. Tiles are mini apps that can fetch data from external sources. Clicking on a tile launches the full app. Apps can be from any existing website to customized website specifically built to fit the Dashboard experience. Droptiles is built almost entirely of HTML, Javascript and CSS and thus highly portable to any platform. The sample project is built using ASP.NET to show some server side integration, like Signup, Login and getting dynamic data from server. But with very little change you can port it to PHP, Ruby, JSP or any other platform. Droptiles is the sequel of my Dropthings, which is the first Open Source Web 2.0 Dashboard.

See it live!, go to Droptiles.com, for Technical Documentation, read the Codeproject article.

Watch my presentation at London AJAX User Group introducing Droptiles and building new Tiles.

Features

It even has its own App Store!

App Store

How can you use Droptiles

Operational Dashboard

News Aggregator

Who am I?

I am Omar AL Zabir, the Chief Architect of SaaS Platform, BT (aka British Telecom). Microsoft MVP on ASP.NET/IIS. Ex Co-Founder and CTO of the first Web 2.0 Social Start Page - Pageflakes, owner of popular open source projects - Dropthings, Codeuml.com.

Follow me on my blog for future updates.

License

Droptiles is Open Source. It is free for personal use as long as you keep the copyright notices intact. In order to buy license, go to the Droptiles production site and there's a tile on the right side to place the order through Paypal.

Once you buy the commercial license, you can remove the copyright notice on the footer. You can make any changes you like on the source code. But you will have to merge the Droptiles main codebase with your customized codebase yourself. If you want to outsource some customization work to offshore developers, let me know.

Email me for any query: omaralzabir at gmail dot com.

Technologies

Screenshots

App Store

App Store

AppStore offers new applications

Tiles are mini apps, built using Javascript

Tiles

Tiles are mini apps that can have their own html, javascript and css. They are loaded by the Dashboard dynamically and executed dynamically. Each tile runs on its own delivering the in-tile experience. There's no special Widget framework to follow. Just plain simple Javascript.

Tiles can be dynamic, loaded from server side pages

Dynamic Tile

Tiles can be dynamic pages delivered from the server. Here is a tile that captures the html output of an ASPX page. Tiles can be intercative as well. You can embed a form inside a tile.

Apps running inside Droptiles

Apps

External applications can run inside Droptiles offering a seamless integration experience.

Flickr

HTML Apps using Droptiles css and js framework.

Why shouldn't I just code it myself?

Documentation

Please go over to the Wiki for detail project documentation.