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Free/Open source software hosting services
THIS EDITION of NetSpeak explores the features of on-line software hosting services that enable web-based collaborative software development.
It is an indisputable fact that the concept of free/open source software has grabbed its rightful place in the IT world and its culture of sharing information is well entrenched into the minds of almost everyone concerned. One of the reasons for the tremendous acceptance/confidence gained by the open source mode of software development is the availability of many applications that encompass a wide range of human endeavours. Open source/free software developers worldwide could achieve this success thanks to the brilliant infrastructure support provided by a few open source software hosting services for free.
Collaborative software development
As all of us know, an open source project is generally accomplished by harnessing the skills of developers spread across the world. To achieve this, a project's resources should be available to everyone involved with it. Each of the participants should be able to examine the code/other details and should be able to alter/edit the contents. As an open source project's success depends on the inputs from others, the project infrastructure should feature tools that enable anyone to register as a developer/user of the project, post new ideas, report bugs and so on. That is, for the successful completion of a collaborative project, a centralised sharable repository with tools for managing the various aspects of the project is required. On the Net there are several open source software hosting services that provide these facilities to anyone for free.
Apart from facilitating the software developers in implementing software solutions by mobilising the support of others with similar skills, software hosting services can also be used by students of computing to enhance their knowledge/skills. This author used to get many letters from students seeking project ideas for doing a project as part of their course. Rather than doing a project on an ordinary problem for a small organisation, if a student initiates a project in a hosting service, it is likely that he gets many innovative ideas/support, which may take the project to unforeseen boundaries. Also, this process will help him gain some exposure to the technology and tools used in collaborative software development. With this positive note, let us have a look at some of the popular software hosting services.
SourceForge
Anyone who has the habit of downloading free/open source packages should certainly be familiar with SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/), the collaborative software development system that hosts tens of hundreds of open source projects. In fact, such programs as phpMyAdmin (http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin/) and eGroupWare (http://sourceforge.net/projects/egroupware/), discussed in this column earlier, are hosted on this service.
Anybody can register with SourceForge and commence a project or start participating in any of the ongoing projects. Once you register with the service, such tools as mailing lists, discussion forums, project management aids, facility for the developers to download/update the source code and so on will automatically be made available to you.
The free software hosting service floated by BerliOS (http://www.berlios.de/) is another good product worth a trail. Check out: https://developer.berlios.de/.
Yet another notable product is Savannah (http://savannah.nongnu.org/), the hosting service of the Free Software Foundation (http://fsf.org), created for hosting free software projects that run on free software servers only. As per its web page, currently the service hosts more than 2,000 projects.
Sarovar.org: An Indian attempt
Now the Indian IT-based economy is booming and our software people wields enormous goodwill in the IT world. In this regard, the launching of the first Indian initiative in the software hosting service arena, Sarovar.org (http://sarovar.org/), which can be used for hosting free/open source software, is timely and significant. The project is funded by the `River Valley Technologies' (http://river-valley.com/), which runs a `text processing and typesetting' company using the free software TeX. As per `River Valley', `they use the tools developed by the free software community for running their business and Sarovar is their humble attempt to give something back to the community'.
Sarovar.org, which is being managed entirely by free software enthusiasts, has all the features that are present in other similar successful projects. Such projects as PSTricks Tutorial and JavaDBF are some of the popular ones that currently run on this server. Mr. Anil Kumar, one of the volunteers who run the project, told this author that Sarovar.org would like to impart special support to students in hosting/developing software on its server. Students may take note of this.
Do you face the problem of managing a machine with less resources and hence would like to run programs with small size? For example, try out the software QM (Quick Mailer- http://pyric.org/qm/index.html) for sending emails, which is just around 18 kb. Actually, there are hundreds of such small programs available on the Net. Check out the TinyApps site (http://www.tinyapps.org/) that hosts links to several small programs developed for a wide range of applications that include Internet, File management and Graphics. The service has a blog, which is also worth a read.
Burks: Resource kit for computer science students
Are you a student of computing or a computing enthusiast? Check out the link: http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/index.htm, which will give you access to a variety of resources that include tutorials on various subjects related to computing, documents on programming techniques and software.
The `programming languages' section features resources to many languages that include Ada, C, C++, PERL and Python. As each segment of this section contains links to compilers and other resources, it will be easy for anyone to try out them.
FindLaw: A search engine for legal professionals
Unlike general search engines, subject specific search engines help us spot right links with minimum effort. If you are looking for some materials related to law, perhaps the search engine FindLaw (http://lawcrawler.findlaw.com) might be of some use.
J. Murali
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