'Net Features : open source

Explore Telescope for Creating Social News Destinations

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:00 GMT

It's not often that Website Magazine features open-source software (we like our software enterprise-level and commercial-grade), but every now and again, a solution emerges that warrants attention. Such is the case with Telescope, an open source social news app/website akin to Reddit (and Digg before it).

The platform, which is built with real-time Javascript framework Meteor, supports real-time updating, post categories, invite-only access, email or Twitter authentication, day-by-day digest view, posting rate limits and notifications.

There are a few interesting use cases already. Sidebar.io uses Telescope's digest view to display the five best design links of the day as curated by a team of contributors.

The software is currently in beta so expect some bugs, but if you're looking to quickly add some real-time social news to your site (and in a modern and elegant way), Telescope will be a terrific fit.

Scalable Java Development Comes to Open Source Community

Michael Garrity — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 09:50:00 GMT

The Web is an increasingly communal organism that provides a way for developers and creative professionals from all around the world to collaborate on projects that can, in some way, end up benefitting nearly everyone who uses the Internet.

Open source communities of developers help facilitate this kind of interaction, and as the technology evolves, this type of collaboration will become even more commonplace. This is likely why Azul Systems has announced that it was going to enhance its support of the Open Source community by making Zing JVM freely available to developers projects to use for development, qualification, and testing their projects.

Azul Systems is letting Open Source applications that support commodity x86 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS, and/or Ubuntu Linux have full access to Zing, the company’s Java virtual machine, and all of its unique features and capabilities, including:

- Improved application responsiveness
- Reduced application latency
- Elimination of response time outliers
- Support for large, in-memory data processing
- Elastic scalability with memory heaps that grow or shrink to meet real-time demands
- Dramatically simplified application deployments
- Reduced customer total cost of ownership
- Accelerated time-to-market
- Improved production time visibility and runtime diagnostics

Zing JVM was built to give developers consistent Java performance and scalability, and putting it into the hands of Open Sources developers (for free, no less!) removes the bottlenecks often associated with Java runtime, while enabling application innovation in new markets, including in-memory computing and big data analysis.

Piwik 1.5 and Open Source Analytics Solutions

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 23:00:00 GMT

Popular open-source analytics solution Piwik just received a major (and we mean major) update in version 1.5. The solution now includes several features which could make the offering competitive in nature to analytics solutions including Google Analytics. Piwik, which is licensed under the GPL, has been used by more than 150,000 web sites.

Piwik users now have the ability to track custom variables on a per page basis, can access inline help for reports, delete old logs to keep database size small, and add custom logos in the UI. But it gets better. Perhaps the most visible change is that Piwik no longer relies on Flash for drawing graphs (now includes JavaScript Canvas Charts which draws graphs using the jqplot library).

The addition of Ecommerce analytics however is what could make Piwik a viable analytics solution. Users now have access to e-commerce specific analytics for tracking orders or product views when visitors add items to their shopping carts. Piwik consulted with Jirafe, an ecommerce analytics company, for the functionality.

The 1.5 update also addresses a critical security vulnerability in the software. In non-default configurations where an anonymous user has access to reports, the Piwik server could be compromised and allow the execution of arbitrary code.

Future of Open Source Bright

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 18 May 2011 02:30:00 GMT

Results from the fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey were released this week and the future looks bright. Open source is now "fully embraced by both the public and private sectors, and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data" according to the study.

Key findings include:

- Respondents identified SaaS, cloud and mobile as the main areas that will impact open source and that are driving growth.

- In 2010 there were 3,800 new open source based projects in mobile, with 94% targeting Android and Apple iOS, more than double the number in 2009.

- There are now more than 470 open source projects targeting cloud computing.

- 56 percent of respondents believe that more than half of software purchases made in the next five years will be open source.

- 95 percent of respondents noted that a turbulent economy continues to be “good” for OSS, though for the first year ever, lower cost has been overtaken by freedom from vendor lock-in as what makes OSS more attractive.

“When we started this survey five years ago, open source was still a movement that was in its nascent stages and its future was promising but still unknown," said Michael Skok, general partner, North Bridge Venture Partners. "The results of this year’s survey clearly demonstrate that open source has gone mainstream not just within the vendor community, but within customer organizations of all types and sizes. Based on what we are seeing from our investments, it’s exciting to see new growth driven by the inherent benefits of open source like community-driven innovation and from fast growing markets such as cloud and mobile computing.”

Open Source and the ERP Market

Administrator — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:03:00 GMT

Open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) company Openbravo indicated that its software has been downloaded over two million times - making it one of the most (if not the most) ERP solutions on the market today.

The milestone comes just a few months after the release of Openbravo 3. The professional and community versions of Openbravo three (and other Web-based solutions of this nature) are quickly proving to be far more efficient and flexible than legacy systems and much more extensible with over 325 modules administrators can choose from.

"The value of open source ERP is undeniable, and any organization that wants to gain competitive advantage by moving from spreadsheets and Quickbooks to an ERP needs to include an open source option during their evaluation," said Paolo Juvara, CEO of Openbravo. "Not only have we seen an increase in the download rate of the Community Edition, but deployments of Openbravo Professional Edition have surged 197% in Europe and 110% in North America."

PostgreSQL 9.0 Released with Built-In Replication

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 20:48:00 GMT

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announced the release of PostgreSQL 9.0, the latest version of the open source relational database.

PostgreSQL 9.0 includes more than a dozen other major improvements that will enhance every aspect of database application design and performance, including: 64-bit Windows support, conditional and per-column triggers, upgrade-in-place from 8.3 and 8.4, deferrable unique constraints, and high-performance event messaging.

"The built-in replication in 9.0 and ability to query a hot standby have been the most requested PostgreSQL features for many years," said Simon Riggs, CTO of 2ndQuadrant and lead contributor to hot standby. "Efficient, low latency streaming replication protects your data better, while hot standby significantly reduces total cost of ownership. In proprietary products, this capability is an add-on which costs thousands of dollars."

Open-Source Project Management

Pete Prestipino — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:51:00 GMT

The recession is over (almost). No longer will you have to scrap for budget leftovers to fulfill your marketing or development obligations. Consumers will start buying again, filling the corporate coffers, enabling you to roll out new campaigns, applications and the creative that power and promote them as fast as you can dream them up. More ideas means more work though, so if you're as smart as we know you are, start thinking about how you will manage the endless stream of projects and tasks. Web Success Weekly to the rescue! Website Magazine's top open-source, Web-based project management software solutions are only a click away.

WaveMaker Widget Development

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:59:00 GMT

WaveMaker, a visual development platform for Web applications, announced a new version of its solution that further reduces development costs for those interested in creating enterprise-ready data widgets.

Traditional approaches to web development require developers to write hundreds of lines of code to retrieve enterprise data and display it in a browser-based client. WaveMaker Studio solves this problem by creating custom data widgets for each database table, eliminating the need for hand coding to build applications that display and edit table-based information.

"WaveMaker 5 allows anyone to build a great-looking, database-driven web application with just three mouse clicks," said Chris Keene, CEO of WaveMaker. "WaveMaker's enterprise-ready data widgets automate all the heavy lifting needed to connect enterprise data to browser-based widgets. Our customers are finding that WaveMaker can knock out over 90% of the effort required to create rich internet applications."

Open Source Drupal CMS Gets a Nod

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:31:00 GMT

If you're in the market for a content management system (and an open-source one to boot), you might be interested to know that the Packt's Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award (very prestigious in CMS circle) was given to Drupal in the overall category, collecting a first prize of $5,000.

Drupal finished ahead of Joomla! and DotNetNuke. The open-source platform has grown substantially by all accounts of late, downloaded almost 1.5 million times in the last 12 months. It is currently being applied by companies such as Warner Brothers Music, MTV UK, and the New York Observer amongst others.

Finishing in second place and receiving $3,000 was Joomla!, the youngest of the three finalists and a previous winner of the Overall Award. Judges were impressed with Joomla's ease of installation and ability to get a website up-and-running in a short space of time. Particular praise was reserved for its sizeable and enthusiastic community, which has allowed the project to grow so quickly in such a short space of time. In third place and receiving $2,000 was DotNetNuke, the only CMS in the final that is written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. DotNetNuke received positive feedback from judges who were impressed with its ease of development and security implementation features.

The most promising CMS system was SilverStripe. SilverStripe is today exclusively revealed as the winner of the 2008 Most Promising Open Source Content Management System. The SilverStripe project received $2,000, holding off strong competition from CMS Made Simple in the first runner up position with ImpressCMS and MiaCMS finishing joint second runner up.

Ecommerce: Magento Should Celebrate

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 02:32:00 GMT

Open source Ecommerce platform Magento is celebrating its first complete year with a birthday cake (of course) and an announcement that its 32,000 members (and 425,000 downloads) render the offering a competitive communal force in transaction-based ecommece systems.

Magento might be a little bare out of the box, but the activity in the community (often rare in the open source market) - represented by 165 extension available through Magento Connect - should give you the confidence that Magento is here to stay.