Dayspring Technologies

InfoWorld compiles its list of best open source software every year about this time. This is this year’s list. For some reason, likely tied to a misguided attempt to generate more page views, InfoWorld presents the list as a series of slides which load extremely slowly. In this post, I’ve pulled out all of the software they highlighted in the Developer Tools and Enterprise Software categories.

Open Source Developer Tools

(View slide presentation)

1. BrowserShots – enter a URL to see snapshots of a web page from 100 different browser versions.
2. Drools – “business logic integration platform”. A business rule management system
3. Eclipse Web Services tools
4. Hadoop and Hive – tools for processing large data sets (terabyte and petabyte-sized). Hadoop allows for parallelization of algorithms and mimics Google’s MapReduce. Hive lets users execute SQL-like queries against the data.
5. jQuery – JavaScript libraries with large developer following, large set of plug-ins.
6. Mono – open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework. Write C# code, ASP.NET applications, etc. and run on Linux and Mac (and Windows).
7. NetBeans – Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Latest release boosts support for Ruby, JRuby, Groovy and Grails, C/C++, and enables unit testing in PHP.
8. OpenStreetMap – location data that can be freely incorporated in other applications (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page)
9. WebKit – browser rendering engine used on iPhone, Android, many Nokia handsets, and Palm Pre (and desktop Safari of course)

Open Source Enterprise Software

(View slide presentation)

1. Compiere – ERP package with basic CRM. Financials, HR/payroll, procurement and inventory management, sales and reporting. www.compiere.com
2. OpenBravo – another ERP package.
3. Dimdim – CentOS streaming media and conferencing server. “Users can share PowerPoint and PDF’s, whiteboards, entire desktops, with audio and video conferencing and public or private chats.” An open source WebEx. www.dimdim.com
4. Drupal – web content management solution used by Dayspring. They recommend the Acquia distribution, which is freely available but includes some commercial support.
5. Intalio BPM – business process management.
6. JasperSoft BI – business intelligence, i.e., reporting tools.
7. Pentaho BI Suite – dashboards not as good as JasperSoft, but “top choice for ETL, workflow, OLAP and multidimensional analysis” (community.pentaho.com)
8. Magento – e-commerce solution supported by Dayspring (www.magentocommerce.com)
9. Piwik – An analytics package running on PHP and MySQL, “open source alternative to Google Analytics”. (piwik.org)
10. SugarCRM – customer relationship management software (www.sugarcrm.com)
11. WordPress – blog platform, supported by Dayspring for Web content management: “one of those free open source projects that has no match even among commercial counterparts” (wordpress.org)

Open Source Networking Software

See the winners here, including Nagios, the monitoring software that we’ve implemented to keep track of customer web sites on our web hosting service (Slide Presentation)

Open Source platforms and Middleware

OpenVZ, Dayspring’s platform of choice for its virtual private server (VPS) web hosting offering is mentioned in this category as a virtualization solution “known for speed, efficiency, and reliability”. See the rest of the winners here: (Slide Presentation)

Also mentioned: VLC, “very good streaming video server that supports both uni- and multi-cast.

Hall of Fame

This year, they added something they call the “Hall of Fame”. The idea here is that there are some open source software packages that are so widespread it hardly makes sense to mention them year after year. InfoWorld’s top picks for most indispensable open source software of all time.

1. Linux kernel
2. GNU utilities, compilers
3. Ubuntu
4. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD
5. Samba – networking library bridging gap between Linux and Windows
6. MySQL
7. BIND
8. Sendmail
9. OpenSSH and OpenSSL
10. Apache – half of the world’s Web sites run on Apache.

Read the full article here: http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/best-open-source-software-awards-2009-628