Guest post by The InfoWorld Test Center rounds up of the past year in open source, highlighting the best open source offerings in several software categories: “The word ‘best’ here can mean many things. It is sometimes equivalent to ‘most promising’, ‘most surprising’, ‘most subversive’, ‘most unnerving’, ‘most opportune’, ‘most happening’, or some weird, inchoate mixture of them all. The one thing it always means is ‘most useful’ – to developers, IT administrators, and users on a business network.” From enterprise apps, to app dev tools, to platforms and middleware, to networking software, the list is expansive, including 39 hybrid license and community offerings.
I would have agreed with nginx (and lighttpd) some month ago, but I think the next awesome, fast, tiny, simple and this time also “easy to use” (without adding bloat and still being) web server will be Cherokee.
http://www.cherokee-project.com/
However, I don’t use it yet. Just had a test installation and wondered why it isn’t more famous yet.
Oh and about the award. The only thing I really can agree on is git. The rest is…
I mean Webmin? Not that it isn’t a great project but, I simply wouldn’t think about an awesome thing in 2010. To mention a project I had a lot of fun with this year. Redis seems to be a project that could really replace SQL databases.
http://code.google.com/p/redis/
Two new, serious and active projects in this year. Anyone knows some more?
Edited 2010-08-25 23:21 UTC
That project is pretty old. I doubt it will catch on like nginx or lighttpd.
That looks like an awesome project. I’ve always thought that key-value stores were too simple for a lot of tasks (and a full SQL database is often overkill). The “structured-ness” of Redis looks like a good intermediate between the two extremes.
Edited 2010-08-26 00:45 UTC
IMO document databases like mongo or couch are more of that middle ground
redis is memcached with persistent storage and replication and some other features like sorting.
probably a lot of stuff people felt were missing from memcached.
Well, I meant because of being a 1.x version now. I know some rough edges, but what do you mean in particular when you say it won’t catch up? I don’t think it will replace all the lighttpd and nginx stuff anytime soon, but when it comes to being fast and available (portable) the project doesn’t look too bad. As I already wrote I didn’t use it for serious stuff yet and don’t know that much about it. Just thought it is a nice alternative that should keep in mind.
Agree with you there. I actually started learning git just 2 weeks ago. Pretty amazing stuff.
I’m just waiting for someone to write a filesystem based on git. Filesystem snapshot / git tag…. same thing
They must be embarrassed. The year isnt over yet so there could be some nice software around the corner … poor editor must of been sleeping on the job again.
pshaw is what I say to that. I know there is a stigma that rails is only used by vc funded startups with no business model, but in reality, most of the rails shops I know of are consulting gigs. It may not have traction in fortune 500 type megacorps, but its got a huge amount of traction in consulting.
With Microsoft ending support for IronRuby, and Oracle doing somewhat the same thing for JRuby, I don’t see that traction increasing much. Scala is the hot thing among web kids these days, IIUC.
A bit early for that, isn’t it?
Just like last year, this years entrants seem to be all about web server technologies, giving a very polarized view of “open source”.
Yes, just for fun I went to sourceforge and looked at the top downloads of all time list (yes very different criteria) and this was the top 20:
emule
azureus
ares galaxy
7-zip
smart package of microsofts core fonts
filezilla
gtk+ and gimp installers for windows
portableapps.com
audacity
dc++
vlc media player
shareaza
bittorrent
virtualdub
cdex
pidgin
pdfcreator
amsn
winscp
autoap
Apart from p2p software being popular (perhaps no surpsrise there), the one thing I noted was that there were quite alot of popular open source software written directly for windows (some of which has later been ported to *nix), from this list we have emule, 7-zip, filezilla, dc++, virtualdub, winscp, cdex.
Not much at all on that list for end users. I browsed the “Best” list and didn’t see a single thing I could use…
For someone looking Open Source products.
Recently I planned with some friends to make a VM and install there some development environments, just for the fun of learning different languages than we have used to. The idea was to merge products in one single VM, but separate each environment by logon – example: webruby user’s logon is prepared to develop Ruby apps for web.
This list will be useful for us. Definitely there are a lot of things to play with.
No XBMC… seriously????
Anyone who has ran XBMC either on their original xbox or on a computer (Linux, Windows, OSX) would know how great it is. I’ve been using it pre-fork when it was still called XBMP.
Anyway, if you couple it with the newly released android application and its simply amazing.
I have a dual zone receiver and I line-out and split out the 2nd zone with two little amps (to control volume independently). So I walk around my game room, my living room with the TV / Xbox, and in my backyard while listening to the same music. Now with this android app on my phone, I’m walking around in full control of the media (although I generally only use it the skip to the next track).