Archive for May, 2011
Apache Software Foundation – How and Why Does it Thrive?
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) celebrated its ten-year anniversary in 2009. Over the past ten years, the ASF has helped open source developers collaborate on large complex projects. The ASF is most well-known as the owners of the code for the Apache web server (httpd), one of the most commonly used web servers on the Internet today. This article examines the reasons behind ASF’s success at retaining developers worldwide and building quality projects consistently year after year.
One reason that the Apache Software Foundation has been able to thrive is that as a non-profit corporation, the ASF is a separate legal entity. This provides a number of advantages to the developers working on code owned by ASF. First, it allows ASF to enter into contracts and sign non-disclosure agreements as needed on behalf of all the developers. The most important aspect however is that it protects the individual developers from legal liability for their code. The ASF assumes all liability for the code owned by the foundation. This safety net helps to encourage developers to work on code for the ASF.
Using Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP For Application Deployment
Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP can all be used to produce software which runs on a web server, and thus eliminates the need for client software installations on a local computer. What this means is that the server contains both the database front end, the database back end, and the client front end all in one package. Upgrades to software based on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP (LAMP) can be done with very little time involved at all, since all of the necessary software will only have to be installed one time, on one computer. In addition, LAMP software could very easily be made available to individuals who are outside of a main office. These workers would simply have to connect to a company’s VPN to run the intended software.
This tutorial will cover LAMP installation on a stand alone server, which will be able to run software designed for a LAMP environment. This tutorial will also cover basic MySQL syntax, so that a server administrator can troubleshoot issues within a particular application. This tutorial already assumes that a working installation of Linux is available, and that networking is already setup on the working installation of Linux. For the sake of this tutorial, all of the LAMP components will be installed from source code when needed, and from binary packages when appropriate. This tutorial should be applicable across all distributions of Linux. The first step is to successfully install Apache.
Introduction to Apache Lucene and Solr
Lucene and Solr are state of the art search technologies available for free as open source from The Apache Software Foundation. Lucene is the underlying search library, and Solr is a platform built on top of Lucene that makes it easy to build Lucene-based applications. Both are full-featured and have excellent performance, relevancy ranking and scalability. These technologies are used today by thousands of organizations and power substantial search applications at AOL, Comcast Interactive Media, IBM, Netflix, LinkedIn and MySpace.
Choosing a Search Engine