New work by open source developers is producing innovative
solutions for business.
Last week I noted that free software has come up with plenty of new
ideas in the past, but that all of the big success stories were
first coded many years ago. Could it be that open source has simply
been coasting since then?
A quick glance at the Apache site gives a hint that this is not the
case. The
Apache web server
has blossomed into the
Apache Software
Foundation, which now organises a number of
important
projects ancillary to the main Apache code. These include
comparatively well-known free software projects such as
Jakarta for server-side
Java;
web services ;
XML; and a module for running
Perl scripts.
The latter is used by a number of
sites
to offer interactive capabilities, and also by
Mason, which provides a
classic example of how open source is continuing to innovate by
building on existing achievements - in this case, Perl and
Apache.
Mason is a
tool for
creating, serving and managing large websites running under a high
load. It achieves this by embedding Perl code in HTML pages. There
is a list of its
features,
a
FAQ and a detailed
online
manual.
There is also a book from
O'Reilly
- proof that Mason has arrived - which is freely available
online.
Another way of producing the same effect as Mason is to use
PHP. I have written about this
open source tool several times before, but it has since turned into
an Apache Software Foundation project. This apparently subordinate
role might give a rather misleading impression about the importance
of PHP. As a
graph on
its home page indicates, PHP is extremely popular.
There is a
FAQ
and further
documentation, and more
than 40
books
about PHP - an indication of its massive uptake. There is also a
PHP company, called
Zend, which
was set up by some of the people behind the latest
PHP
version. It offers various
commercial solutions based
around PHP.
Midgard integrates
PHP with other open source software - Apache and the database
MySQL - to produce a
comprehensive
content
management system that is freely available. There is a
FAQ and a list of
companies
providing services and solutions based around the software.
Similarly, there is a
company offering commercial
solutions for the open source
Zope system. Built around the
Python language, Zope is a
fully fledged
application
server. Comprehensive
documentation is
available, including several
FAQs and the full
text of the
first
book about Zope.
In a sense, content management and application servers are the
heirs of the basic interactive web server concept that Apache and
Perl pioneered. So it is appropriate that this area should
represent such a rich seam for open source developers - one that
gives the lie to any claim that free software is not continuing to
innovate.