In a Time of Less, Do More with Open Source: Top 25 Open Source Projects That Will Help Trim Development Budgets
In challenging economic times, how do internal application development teams continue to deliver higher quality software and Web applications with fewer resources? Unlike in past economic downturns, development teams today have a resource they can turn to in order to lower the costs of development, maintain high-quality, and decrease cost of ownership for the long run: open source software.
If you are looking for resourceful ways to trim engineering budgets, while ensuring that application development work continues to be a competitive advantage for your business, take a look at these projects -- some of the best open source projects Palamida has seen used inside organizations of all sizes.
25 Hot Open Source Projects Organizations Should Be Using Today
Development Tools
| Description | Overview | Cost to Develop In-House* |
| Project Name: NetBeans | ||
| IDE providing developers with all the tools they need to create professional cross-platform desktop, enterprise, web and mobile applications, with support for Java, JavaScript, C, and C++. Runs on many platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and the MacOS. It is easy to install and use straight out of the box. | Established in 2000, with sponsorship from Sun Microsystems. Maintains an active developer community of over 500 contributors. | 235 person years or $12,946,401 |
| Project Name: Eclipse | ||
| Complete development platform comprising extensible application frameworks, tools and a runtime library for software development and management. It is written primarily in Java to provide software developers and administrators an integrated development environment (IDE). | Established in 2001 with sponsorship from IBM and other vendors. Maintains an active developer community of over 200 contributors. | 2,264 person years or $12,501,084 |
| Project Name: JUnit | ||
| Java testing framework that enables developers to cheaply and incrementally build a test suite that will help them measure their progress, spot unintended side effects, and focus their development efforts. | Established in 2002 with sponsorship from Object Mentor. Maintains active developer community with 7 contributors. | 4 person years or $213,508 |
| Project Name: Httpunit | ||
| Automated web testing framework that emulates the relevant portions of browser behavior, including form submission, Javascript, basic HTTP authentication, cookies, and automatic page redirection, and allows Java test code to examine returned pages either as text, an XML DOM, or containers of forms, tables, and links. When combined with a framework such as JUnit, it is fairly easy to write tests that very quickly verify the functioning of a Web site. | One dedicated project maintainer since 2003, with over 40 contributors. | 103 person years or $5,659,573 |
| Project Name: PMD | ||
| Java source code analyzer. It finds unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and more. It includes CPD, a tool to detect chunks of identical code. | Dedicated community of 16 team members, established since 2002. | 66 person years or $3,642,640 |
| Project Name: Valgrind | ||
| Suite of tools for debugging and profiling Linux programs. Users can automatically detect many memory management and threading bugs, avoiding hours of frustrating bug-hunting, making programs more stable. Users can also perform detailed profiling, to speed up and reduce memory use inside applications. | Dedicated community of 11 team members, established since 2003. | 60 person years or $3,307,271 |
| Project Name: FindBugs | ||
| Looks for bugs in Java programs. It can detect a variety of common coding mistakes, including thread synchronization problems, misuse of API methods, etc. | Dedicated community of 9 team members, established since 2003, with sponsorship from both Google and Sun Microsystems. | 45 person years or $2,457,935 |
*Cost to Develop calculation from ohloh.net using the COCOMO model.
Database and Mapping Tools
| Description | Overview | Cost to Develop In-House* |
| Project Name: Hibernate | ||
| A powerful, high performance object/relational persistence and query service for Java. It lets engineers develop persistent objects following common Java idiom, including composition, association, inheritance, polymorphism, and the Java collections framework. | Dedicated community of 16 team members, established since 2002. | 233 person years or $12,813,393 |
| Project Name: SQLite | ||
| Small C library that implements a self-contained, embeddable, zero-configuration SQL database engine. Implements most of SQL92 and ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, and durable) transactions; no setup or administration needed. | Dedicated community of 25 contributors, established since 2000. | 29 person years or $1,606,773 |
| Project Name: MySQL | ||
| A relational database management system with more than 11 million installations. | MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the code base. | unavailable |
| Project Name: Apache Derby | ||
| A relational database implemented entirely in Java. Some key advantages include a small footprint (about 2 megabytes for the base engine and embedded JDBC driver) and being based on the Java, JDBC, and SQL standards. | Dedicated community of over 32 contributors, established since 2005. | 166 person years or $9,086,983 |
| Project Name: PostgreSQL | ||
| A relational database system that has earned a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. | Dedicated community of over 30 contributors, established since 1996. | 146 person years or $8,039,337 |
*Cost to Develop calculation from ohloh.net using the COCOMO model.
Core Utility Classes
| Description | Overview | Cost to Develop In-House* |
| Project Name: zlib | ||
| Designed to be a free, general-purpose, lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. | Dedicated community started by Mark Adler and Jean-loup Gailly in 1997. Stable version v1.2.3 since July 2006. | unavailable |
| Project Name: libpng | ||
| The official PNG reference library. It supports almost all PNG features, is extensible, and has been extensively tested for over 12 years. | One dedicated project maintainer, with 8 contributors, since 1996. | unavailable |
| Project Name: FFmpeg | ||
| A complete solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. | Dedicated community of almost 80 contributors, established since 2000. | 81 person years or $4,439,936 |
| Project Name: Freetype | ||
| Software font engine that is designed to be small, efficient, highly customizable and portable while capable of producing high-quality output (glyph images). It can be used in graphics libraries, display servers, font conversion tools, text image generation tools, and many other products as well. | Dedicated community of almost 30 contributors, established since 1997. | 64 person years or $3,526,986 |
*Cost to Develop calculation from ohloh.net using the COCOMO model.
Reporting and Charts
| Description | Overview | Cost to Develop In-House* |
| Project Name: JFreeChart | ||
| Chart library for the Java platform that supports a wide range of charts including pie charts (2D and 3D), bar charts (horizontal and vertical, regular or stacked, with optional 3D-effects), line charts, XY plots, scatter plots, time series charts, high/low/open/close charts, candlestick plots, Gantt charts, Pareto charts, combination charts, and more. | Founded in 2004, with one dedicated project maintainer, with four contributors and a user base of almost 50,000 developers. | 43 person years or $2,338,036 |
| Project Name: Velocity | ||
| A simple yet powerful Java-based template engine that renders data from plain Java objects to text, xml, email, SQL, Post Script, and HTML etc. The template syntax and rendering engine are both easy to understand and quick to learn and implement. | Dedicated community of 9 contributors established in 2002 and part of the larger Apache Software Foundation. | 13 person years or $701,339 |
| Project Name: Pentaho Reporting | ||
| A class library for generating reports. XML-based templates provide flexible reporting and printing functionality using data from multiple sources. It supports output to display devices, printers, PDF, Excel, HTML, XHTML, PlainText, XML and CSV files. | Established in 2002 with almost 20 contributors. | 444 person years or $24,425,468 |
| Project Name: JasperReports | ||
| Java reporting library. XML report templates are used to generate ready to print documents using data from customizable data sources, including JDBC. The output can be delivered to the screen, printer, or stored in PDF, HTML, XLS, RTF, ODT, CSV, TXT and XML format. | Established in 2005 with 15 contributors and part of the JasperForge. | 63 person years or $3,486,668 |
*Cost to Develop calculation from ohloh.net using the COCOMO model.
Web 2.0
| Description | Overview | Cost to Develop In-House* |
| Project Name: Prototype | ||
| A JavaScript framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. Featuring a unique, easy-to-use toolkit for class-driven development and the nicest Ajax library around. | Established in 2005, with a dedicated community of 11 engineers. Major users include NBC, CNN, Apple and amazon.com. | 2 person years or $127,497 |
| Project Name: script.aculo.us | ||
| Provides easy-to-use, cross-browser user interface JavaScript libraries to make web sites and web applications fly. | Established in 2005, with a dedicated community of 7 engineers. Major users include NASA, Apple and CNN. | 3 person years or $169,895 |
| Project Name: Direct Web Remoting | ||
| A simple servlet plug-in that allows users to expose selected Java classes via JavaScript. DWR makes calling Java code directly from a web form simple. DWR can make writing interactive DHTML pages (like GMail) very much simpler. | Established in 2005, with 10 contributors. | 50 person years or $2,762,729 |
| Project Name: Yahoo! User Interface | ||
| A set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. | Part of the larger The Yahoo! Developer Network, which offers Web Services and APIs that make it easy for developers to build applications and mashups that integrate data sources in new ways. | unavailable |
| Project Name: jQuery | ||
| A fast, concise, JavaScript library that simplifies how users traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to Web pages. | Founded in 2005, with almost 60 contributors. | 74 person years or $4,071,203 |
1 comment:
Hi all,
I am working for a software integrator company. My projects includes working on Java and Ruby on Rails and Ajax. I think Web Services is really cool. We also recently have to now work on REST and they are talking about mashups and Struts. Can anyone tell me if there are some good training or conferences so that me and my team members can get to speed with these technologies. Learning from books is not my cup of tea, even not when I was doing engineering ;)
All the help that group members can provide in this regard is much appreciated.
Thanks,
Vaibhavi
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