Information Week released what they deem the top ten stories dealing with open source for the year of 2008 earlier this month. Reminisce all of the happy memories we’ve had of open source throughout this past year: nestle with netbooks, gallop with Google, frolic with Fedora, cuddle with copyrights, and even get your hands on a juicy murder mystery.
Open Source Pixels
Every Pixel Counts
The Top Ten Open Source Stories of 2008
WineX 1.0 (Default branch)
WineX is a WordPress plugin that grabs the
contents of a CellarTracker wine cellar once a day
and stores them on a Web server allowing users to
see a specific wine cellar on a site, in that Web
site’s theme.
ThemeX 0.1 (Default branch)
The ThemeX plugin alternates a WordPress
installation between two themes based on the time
of day. The themes and start times for each are
customizable through an administration interface.
JavaFBP 2.3 (Default branch)
JavaFBP is a Java implementation of the concepts described
in the book “Flow-Based Programming”. It allows a
developer to specify an application as a network of “black-
box” components, which are implemented as long-running
Java threads, connected by bounded buffer connections,
over which data objects travel (”information packets”). The
network is also specified as a Java program, which maps a
visual connection diagram. The black box processes can be
reconnected as desired to form different applications without
having to be changed internally.
License: Artistic License
Changes:
Component description now held in metadata, not in the introspect() method. The isConnected() method has been added for output ports. The directory packaging has been changed somewhat. The source is now available via the SourceForge SVN.
Dapper Dataflow Engine 0.95 (Default branch)
Dapper, or “Distributed and Parallel Program
Execution Runtime”, is a tool for taming the
complexities of developing for large-scale cloud
and grid computing, enabling the user to create
distributed computations from the essentials: the
code that will execute, along with a dataflow
graph description. It supports rich execution
semantics, carefree deployment, a robust control
protocol, modification of the dataflow graph at
runtime, and an intuitive user interface.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
A new, flexible logging infrastructure has been added. Initializers for logging structures have been moved out of the Server and Client classes and into drivers. Finite state machines have been updated to the new annotation-driven API. The source code has been normalized to have 8 spaces instead of tabs.
DataparkSearch 4.51 (Default branch)
DataparkSearch is a Web search engine tool. It features support for http, https, ftp, nntp, and news URLs, htdb virtual URL support for
indexing SQL databases, text/html, text/xml, text/plain, audio/mpeg (MP3), and image/gif mime types built-in support, external parsers
support for other document types, the ability to index multilangual sites using content negotiation, searching of all of the word forms
using ispell affixes and dictionaries, stopwords and synonyms lists, boolean query language support, results sorting by relevancy, popularity
rank, last modified time, and importance (a multiplication of the relevancy and popularity ranks), support for various character sets, and
phrases segmenting for the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Thai languages. It has accent-insensitive search, mod_dpsearch for Apache, and support for internationalized domain names.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL)
Changes:
CAS-based synchronization has been implemented for the i386/x86_64 platform. The ActionSQL, FastHrefCheck, SubDocCnt, andSubDocLevel commands have been added. Support for the KOI8-C (an extension of KOI8-R with old-Russian letters) charset has been added. HrefSection processing has been fixed in the XML parser. A $(url.directory) meta-variable has been added. An allin<section>: operator has been added to the search query language.
onPHP 1.0.8 (Current branch)
onPHP is an object-oriented framework aimed at
rapid development of scalable robust applications
with outstanding code reusability level. It also
provides code generation tools to save your time,
and a PHP extension (module) to save the CPU time
of your servers.
License: GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
Changes:
Various bugfixes and optimizations were backported from the trunk.
Ubuntu Ultimate 2.0 : Ubuntu 8.10 + Well Customized GNOME + Multimedia Codecs + KDE Goodies
After Ubuntu gained popularity, some distributions switched to Ubuntu as their base distribution. Also many new Ubuntu based distributions started to appear. Most of these can be categorized based on the following criteria…
How Linux admins can avoid common pitfalls
For many, migrating to Linux is a rite of passage that equates to a thing of joy. For others, it’s a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s wonderful when it’s the former; it’s a real show stopper when it’s the latter. But that nightmare doesn’t have to happen, especially when you know, first hand, the most common mistakes new Linux administrators make. This article will help you avoid those mistakes by laying out the most typical Linux missteps.
* OSNews: What We’d Like To See in 2009 *
The internet, and much of the real world as well, is currently in list mode. Just about any possible list that can be made up regarding 2008 will be made up somewhere, so we decided not to reinvent the wheel and look forward instead of backward. Since we like to leave the guessing predicting to the analysts, we just limited ourselves to what tech-related matters we would like to see in 2009. Read on for our lists, and of course, post your own in the comments. And lest we forget: a very happy 2009 from the OSNews crew! Read more on this exclusive OSNews article…