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The greatest “eureka” moment I’ve had on the road to becoming a more productive developer was the discovery of open source libraries. Much in the same way that the introduction to and ultimate understanding of the usage of functions, objects, methods and inheritance in my web apps is helping move me away from bloated, redundant code, finding out that I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I need to implement a common feature has been a huge timesaver.

The reality of developing a web application is that many of the features clients are looking for are often ubiquitous across the web. The desire to reduce time wasted on rewriting the same code over and over again has driven developers from around the world to create flexible, often cross-browser solutions that have been contributed to and refined by the open source community-at-large. Common items include text field autocomplete, embedding .swf’s, and toggling visibility of objects on the front end as well as abstracting database queries and templating systems on the back end.

Here’s a few that we used recently for our MSN Games social networking project:

• jQuery (javascript)
  We needed to create a “friend picker” on Myspace, so we built a web service that queries the Myspace API that returns an array (“user name” => “Myspace user id”) which is passed into an autocomplete plugin for jQuery.
• SWFObject 2 (javascript)
  Lightweight javascript for embedding SWF’s. Handles all of the cross browser issues and gracefully degrades if the user has javascript disabled or hasn’t installed the Flash plug-in.
• ADODB (PHP)
  This database abstraction library takes care of a lot of the meat and potatoes of pulling data from your database.
• Smarty Template Engine (PHP)
  All of our HTML was spit out from the Smarty engine. We were able to render different display elements for Myspace or Facebook from within the same template using Smarty conditional statements.