The Search for an Open Source Killer App for Web 2.0

A quiet battle of sorts is taking place behind the scenes in the software industry. Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing have evolved, placing much more attention on Web-based applications.

This greater focus has also raised expectations for the services delivered via Web 2.0. The open source software community has responded to this growing demand for a software-driven Internet by building some of the leading Web apps available.

"I'm seeing more innovation in open source in this area. I'm not seeing closed source developers getting into this. Instead, they are relying on Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and [other] proprietary developers," Aaron Fulkerson, cofounder and CEO of MindTouch, told LinuxInsider.

This technology from open source developers will encourage the next wave of innovation for the Web, he noted.

Witty Wikis

Wikis are major Web 2.0 application, and significant commercial players are joining the scene, according to Fulkerson. His company developed the Deki Wiki, an open source, scalable and programmable wiki and application platform. It extends the ability for communities and businesses to deploy enterprise-class custom applications and mashups.

Two schools of thought are developing for Web 2.0 apps, according to Fulkerson. Object-oriented design pattern is still being used. But this approach does not lend itself well to scaling up and is very costly for Web 2.0.

"Much of the stuff on the Web is crappily designed. Most of it is done by code hackers putting together generic modules. This is very low-end stuff," Fulkerson said.

Instead, Web technology is headed to a distributed environment. Multi-tenant support lets a high number of instances of a single application run from a single server application host, he explained.

A Mixed Bag

Web 2.0 applications cover a wide variety of uses, and open source projects are heavily used in developing these software solutions. Two of the biggest application types are wikis and blogging systems.

"Open source is becoming integrated with proprietary products. Our customers are both open source and proprietary," Ilan Sehayek, CTO of Jitterbit, told LinuxInsider. "You can code yourself or use a myriad of products to do the integration."

Jitterbit is designed to handle complex integration challenges between legacy, enterprise and on-demand applications, including business process fusion, ETL (extract, transform and load), SaaS, and SOA (system-oriented architecture). About half of his company's customers use Linux, while the other half use Windows. His goal is to make Jitterbit an open source platform of choice to handle this integration, said Sehayek.

Web 2.0 Killer App?

The search is still on for a definitive killer app for Web 2.0. But Sehayek is still waiting to see what falls out in the Web space.

"In the operating space, Linux is the killer app. In the Web server space, Apache is incredibly adopted. Even companies running Windows still use Linux servers," he explained.

But Web 2.0 applications are just starting to come at a higher level, he said.

Web App Rundown

As a testament to the flurry of open source development nestling the Web, LinuxInsider asked software developers to suggest the hottest open source apps in use today. Very few respondents sung the same tune.

But we did hear a refrain in some of their responses that suggests a handful of open source projects worthy of consideration. So the following unranked listing presents a quick rundown on pockets of strong interest in the open source Web world.

Polishing the Chrome

One of the newest Web platforms is Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) Chrome browser. It combines a minimalistic design with technology to make it run faster, safer and easier, according to its developers. The community used components from Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox.

The OpenSocial project is a set of common application programming interfaces (APIs) for Web-based social network applications, developed by Google along with MySpace. The platform helps these sites share their social data with the Web.

Applications using the OpenSocial APIs can be embedded within a social network or can access a site's social data from anywhere on the Web. The OpenSocial Foundation is a non-profit corporation created to sustain the free and open development of OpenSocial specifications.

Classic Projects

Old hat does not always mean outdated in the open source world. Some longstanding projects continue to contribute mightily to the Web's power. For example, Eclipse and Python continue to form the basis of much of the Web's underbelly.

Eclipse, originally created by IBM (NYSE: IBM) in November 2001, was supported by a consortium of software vendors. Eclipse is a universal tool platform that uses an open extensible integrated development environment and dozens of plug-ins. Its open source community is focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle.

A detailed list of the widespread projects the Eclipse community maintains is available here.

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language adaptable for for many kinds of software development. It supports integration with other languages and tools and comes with extensive standard libraries.

Python runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, OS/2, Amiga, Palm handhelds and Nokia mobile phones. Python has also been ported to the Java and .Net virtual machines.

Getting the Word Out

Online publishing has become a new world unto itself. Gone are the days when wordsmiths had to create documents in a word processor and convert it to HTML formatting for uploading to a Web site. One of the most visible open source responses to Web 2.0 growth has been in the realm of online communication.

For instance, Chyrp is a lightweight, open source blogging application modeled after Tumblr. Its engine is lightweight yet very functional.

Chyrp is driven by PHP and MySQL plus some Ajax for good measure. Its theme is highly personalizable. Its structure is loosely based on the Model-View Controller (MVC) design pattern.

Tumblelogs, an earlier open source project from Tumblr.com is a very popular publishing platform. Users can share text, photos, quotes, links, music and videos from their browser, phone, desktop or e-mail .

The program is very customizable. Users can tweak most display elements, from colors to the theme's HTML markup. The program also allows use of the user's own domain name.

More Words to Go

Two programs that provide a more focused tool for the blogosphere are Textpatter and WordPress.

Textpattern is a popular platform for blogging. It uses Textile, a simple syntax for enhancing plain text into structurally sound and stylistically rich web content.

The latest version (4.07) includes some sophisticated features. For example, WYSIWYG provides a real-time preview for all articles, even those in draft or hidden state. Another new feature is an XML-RPC server, which replaces the separate download needed previously.

A cool feature lets authors tag their articles with an optional expiration timestamp. This gives writers the option to let their work disappear from the public site completely or transform the work's appearance. Also, the communication channel to the database server can employ optional SSL (secure sockets layer) encryption.

Perhaps one of the most popular entries in this space is WordPress. It is a state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, Web standards and usability.

The newest version, 2.7 Coltrane, has a new interface and speedier performance. When it first appears in 2003, WordPress simply enhanced the typography of everyday writing. Today it is used on countless thousands of sites. It is built on PHP and MySQL.

Solution for the Social Minded

Open source software has the power to feed the social networking frenzy. Two contenders in this space are Elgg and MediaWiki

Elgg is a relative newcomer to social networking platforms in its 1.0 release in 2004. The platform makes it easy for users to create their own social network. Its flexible social networking engine is designed to run at the core of any socially-aware application.

Elgg runs on Apache, PHP and MySQL. This makes it a good fit for Web 2.0, as these are the same open source platforms in which most Web applications are written. Elgg is compatible with enterprise technologies like the Zend Platform and any server environment that can run the Apache Web server. It also supports OpenDD, OpenID and OpenSocial.

MediaWiki is the wiki software that was originally developed for Wikipedia. It is designed to run on a large server farm for a Web site with daily hits in the millions. It uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database. Pages are rendered in MediaWiki's wikitext format so users can edit without knowledge of XHTML or cascading style sheets (CSS).

Pre-edited pages are saved in the database for easy reversals. MediaWiki manages both image and multimedia files and supports caching and Squid proxy server software.