Top 5 open source apps of 2006
by Justin Silverton
The following are the top 5 open source apps of 2006.
Ruby on Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.
Rails has become one of the easiest and fastest ways to develop full-fedged web applications.
4) PHP
PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage. Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. “Personal Home Page Tools” was publicly released on June 8, 1995after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI. source
Php is now the 5th most popular programming language, below java, c, c++, and Visual Basic.
When most people give examples of successful open source projects, apache is usually one of them. It is now serving millions of websites worldwide (including this one) and should be considered a great example of open source engineering.
2) Ubuntu Linux
With over 8 million users and growing, ubuntu linux has quickly become one of the most popular and easy-to-use linux distributions.
From the website: “Ubuntu is suitable for both desktop and server use. The current Ubuntu release supports PC (Intel x86), 64-bit PC (AMD64), Sun UltraSPARC and T1 Sun Fire T1000 and T2000), PowerPC (Apple iBook, Powerbook, G4 and G5) and OpenPower (Power5) architectures.”
1) Firefox
Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross began working on the Firefox project as an experimental branch of the Mozilla project. They believed that the commercial requirements of Netscape’s sponsorship and developer-driven feature creep compromised the utility of the Mozilla browser To combat what they saw as the Mozilla Suite’s software bloat, they created a pared-down browser, with which they intended to replace the Mozilla Suite. On April 3, 2003, The Mozilla Organization announced that they planned to change their focus from the Mozilla Suite to Firefox and Thunderbird. source
Over the last year, Firefox has become the new ruler in the web browser realm. It is more secure, and in my opinion faster than Internet Explorer and many other browsers.
4 Comments so far
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Well, Ruby on Rails has stupid syntax if you ask me and PHP probably the most dangerous sh*t that n00b can have in his hands.
Also almost all selections are pretty much old (especially apache), so I realy don’t know why you posted them. Nab
The fact that many of these are old doesn’t make them a bad choice for this list. Many of these projects took years to get to a certain level of popularty and acceptance. Applications such as firefox are just now gaining acceptance among non-techie people.
Do you have some better choices?
I would have to agree with mt here. Ruby on Rails has terrible syntax, PHP encourages several security issues (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/php-security-blunders) and Apache, Ubuntu, and Firefox are nothing new.
Proposed Alternatives:
The Python Language (http://python.org/)
The Django Framework (http://djangoproject.com/)
lighttpd Http Server (http://lighttpd.net/)
Gentoo Linux (http://gentoo.org)
The Firefox browser (…it’s great. Really)
Joshua,
Firefox is on the list and the rest of your items are just as old as the ones I listed (except maybe the django framework..which has a domain that was created in April of 2005).