Open Source: A Wealth of Tools for the New Year

Technology headlines last year were dominated by Cloud Computing and Social Media.  2010 was a relatively quiet year for the world of Open Source, but that’s not to say that there hasn’t been a lot of activity.  At the start of 2011 there are a number of interesting Open Source projects that could have a big impact in the year to come.

Let’s have a look at just a very small number of some of the interesting Open Source projects that are out there:

CouchDB – Apache CouchDB (Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware) is an Open Source document-oriented database supported by CouchOne and Cloudant.  CouchDB is written in the Erlang programming language and takes the NoSQL approach to storing data.  It is designed for local replication and is able to scale vertically across many devices.   CouchDB was designed to be able to work with many distributed unreliably connected data stores and to be able to still effectively function when some devices become disconnected or get removed from the network.  CouchDB has become especially popular for both server and mobile development.

Eucalyptus – Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is the Open Source equivalent of Amazon EC2 and S3 services.  Development was sponsored by Eucalyptus Systems, a venture-backed start-up, and now more recently, it is receiving support from Red Hat.  Eucalyptus provides cloud-computing infrastructure on clusters that duplicate the functionality of Amazon’s EC2.  In fact, Eucalyptus uses the same  command-line tools which use the same syntax as Amazon.

Windmill – Windmill is a cross-browser web application testing tool.  It allows sessions to be recorded and then to be played back as test script scenarios.  It supports scripting using Javascript, Ruby and Python.  It’s an easier-to-use alternative to Selenium, a tool often used for testing web-based applications, but which is tuned primarily for use with the FireFox browser.

HBase – Apache HBase is an Open Source, non-relational, distributed database that provides a fault-tolerant way of storing large quantities of sparse data.  It was modeled after Google’s BigTable and is written in Java and is part of the Apache Hadoop project.  The goal of HBase is to provide companies with a single live back end that can be used for data analysis with Hadoop and that can also serve up data in live web sites.  It avoids the need to move live data into a separate Hadoop cluster for processing.  HBase is beginning to be used as an alternative to MySQL for simple database-backed application.

Openbravo ERP – Openbravo ERP is a commercial Open Source product supported by the Spanish company Openbravo.  The product is a three-time winner Inforworld’s Bossie award for best open source application.  It was again awarded the prize in August 2010.  The Openbravo ERP system contains modules for finance, sales, purchasing and inventory.  Similar to the Alfresco model, two versions of the software are available, one a free community edition, and the other, a more feature-rich professional version.  It provides great flexibility so that without customizations, it is possible to add features via a plug-in architecture and to tailor templates that allow application behavior configuration, and the roles-based portal page allows easy end-user customizability.