The Open Source Applications Foundation started to post summary information about their activities. The first “OSAF Status Update February 26 2003” is available at http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Main/OSAFStatusReports.
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PEAR Foundation Class Proposal
It seems like Christian Stocker found a way to raise the reputation of the PEAR class library project with his recent proposal: “I made a proposal to the pear-dev mailinglist about PEAR Foundation Classes (aka PFC). The main idea behind it is to provide some kind of badge to well-established, well-reviewed, well-written and well-documentated code within PEAR.” Find more information at Christian’s blog entry.
A Distributed Computing Pattern Language
This wonderful paper by Frank Buschmann and Kevlin Henney provides some useful information about software design patterns for distributed computing. A worthwhile read for relaxation at the weekend 😉 The document has been written for the EuroPLoP 2002 conference. There are some more very interesting texts available at http://www.hillside.net/patterns/EuroPLoP2002/.
XSLT for OAI
A XSLT stylesheet is available which renders OAI XML output to HTML. It is intended to be used by browsers that support XSLT. Tim Brody, the developer, put it online at http://celestial.eprints.org/stylesheets/celestial.xsl.
WBXML – WAP Binary XML Content Format
From the specification: “This specification defines a compact binary representation of the Extensible Markup Language XML. The binary XML content format is designed to reduce the transmission size of XML documents, allowing more effective use of XML data on narrowband communication channels. Refer to the WML specification for one example use of the binary XML content format.”
Bitfluxeditor
Christian Stocker is doing a rewrite of Bitfluxeditor based on Midas. Here’s an excerpt of his mail to the Bitfluxeditor developers mailinglist:
“I was able to insert arbitary elements and intercept/override key/mouseevents, so everything I had doubts about, seems to be possible.Therefore I will give it a try for the BXE NG and try to integrate it. This will save us certainly a lot of hassle with the keyevents handling and hopefully make it faster. Furthermore, the big Ã?, resp. dead keys do also work with midas. I couldn’t get them working with JS keypress events (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192935 for the record).
Concerning Mozilla < 1.3 /Netscape 7, I think, it should be possible to still support them. We'll use Midas mainly for the typing stuff, not the formatting stuff, so it should be just a matter of additional keyevents in Mozilla <1.3 as it is now (of course, it's much more debugging/testing work, but as long as Mozilla 1.3 isn't that widespread (it's not even out yet..) it's well worth the effort.)"
PHPortlet
Joachim Breitsprecher ported the IBM Websphere Portlet system to PHP. The alpha version has today been committed to CVS. The project homepage resides on Sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phportlet.
SRM Modifications
The Script Running Machine (SRM) will be optimized. Maintainer Derick Rethans sent the following TODO list to the SRM mailinglist:
– Make connection handling Multi-threaded
– Port the extension to ZE2
– Implement timers
SRM is a PHP extension that does all sort of persistent storage for PHP. This storage can be simple variables for applications, but also objects, and even running objects called Bananas (similar to Java Beans). For more information see the website dedicated to SRM.
MyLifeBits Project
“The MyLifeBits project aims to put all personal documents and media online, to allow time-shifting, and location independence when you are connected to MyLifeBits.” (Microsoft Bay Area Research Center Media Presence Group), http://research.microsoft.com/barc/MediaPresence/MyLifeBits.aspx. This pointer came in via OSCOM mailinglist.
With CONESYS, one could even decide which of his personal data he wants to share with the public or a certain group of people.
Numbers and Facts
David A. Wheeler: “This paper provides quantitative data that, in many cases, using open source software / free software is a reasonable or even superior approach to using their proprietary competition according to various measures. This paperâ??s goal is to show that you should consider using OSS/FS when acquiring software. This paper examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions. An appendix gives more background information about OSS/FS.”
http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html
Sandro Groganz 