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Rich: Justin, can you tell us a bit more about what that means. How someone would actually use this product.

Justin: Sure, and thanks for having me on, Rich. As you mentioned, GeoServer is a GIS data server written in Java. What it allows for is the publishing and sharing of GIS, or geospatial data, on the web.

When I say GIS or geospatial data, what I mean is data that has location associated with it. When you’re looking at a map and you see a road or a building on a map, that building has some geospatial representation of it, that allows us to place it on a map accordingly.

The analogy I usually use is GeoServer is sort of a specialized Web server for geospatial data. Typically where we see it used is with web mapping. So using it as a backend to create a Google Maps type web map, but with full control over things like cartography and styling

Rich: The data that’s included in this - where does that come from?

Justin: GeoServer ships with what we call a vanilla or demo data, and that’s data that’s been gathered from all over the place. I believe there’s a subset of it that comes from New York City. But you’re certainly not constrained to that data. Typically people use GeoServer with their own data. So it might be a government agency that has satellite imagery or something like that, that they want to publish on the web. They can use GeoServer to connect to that data and serve it up for them.

Rich: Can you give me some examples of sites are using this?

Justin: Certainly. We’ve seen a lot of update in GeoServer in the last two years. A lot of it we see in the government sector, from federal all the way down to municipal. For instance, the FCC uses it in something called their Broadband Map, which is essentially a map of high speed Internet connectivity across the United States. You can go to the map and see things like high-speed Internet density at a country scale. You can also go down to the state and county scales as well. And that is all using GeoServer on the back-end.

The city of Portland uses GeoServer in their transportation authority call TriMet. If you go to the TriMet site - TriMet.org, you’ll see a map of the Portland transportation network, with all the routes and stops, and that stuff on it. And it also comes with trip planner, where you put in a source and destination where you want to go, and the route is calculated and displayed on a map. That all comes with GeoServer on the back end.

A final example is, New York City uses it in something called their SCOUT program. SCOUT stands for street conditions observation unit. Essentially how it works is, inspectors will go out in New York, and drive the streets, and they’ll report on conditions and events that they see, and those reports are fed back into their system, and displayed on a map, served by GeoServer in real time. That map is used by other agencies to allocate and dispatch resources accordingly.

Rich: The route finding stuff … is that included in to GeoServer as well?

Justin: The way Portland uses it is that they have their own route trip software that they use. So they do the route calculation and then push the result into GeoServer. However I should mention that it’s using something called Open Trip Planner, which is another Open Source project, and that’s an Open Source based trip planning multi-modal project.

Rich: I see that you have a fairly sizeable developer pool. What’s the process for somebody becoming a full developer on a project like this?

Justin: Good question. We don’t just hand commit access out, obviously, as most Open Source projects do. It’s all based on trust for us. What we encourage developers who interested in contributing, is to submit as many patches as they can. And we have formal review process for patches. Patches are commented on. We get the patch submitter to clean things up. Or we just apply the patch if it’s good enough. And once a developer has submitted enough patches, gaining the trust of the core developer community - we don’t have a specific number - they’re granted commit access.

We also have a module system in GeoServer. Someone might want to contribute just a module, and then they become the maintainer of that specific module. That gives them commit access for that specific module, but not necessarily to some of the other core modules.

Rich: Do you have a formal vote, or is it just consensus on the mailing list?

Justin: For things like patches, it’s pretty informal in terms of voting. We require that at least two core committers review a patch. They give their two plus-ones, and then the patch can be submitted. We also have a formal improvement proposal process, which we call GeoServer Improvement Proposal, and that’s more formal, and it’s really designed for larger changes. Things like architectural changes, breaking backwards compatibility, stuff like that. And that’s a formal process. We require the whole project steering committee to vote on that, and there has to be more positive votes than negative.

Certainly it didn’t start off like that. In the early years - back in the early two-thousands - is was pretty informal, and it was one or two developers doing things pretty ad-hoc. As the development community grew, and people were doing more and more contributions, it really became more critical. And now it’s a framework we rely upon to move things on the project smoothly.

Rich: I noticed that there’s also commercial support available for GeoServer. Can you tell me about that.

Justin: I work for a company called OpenGeo, who essentially does that. We offer offer products that bundle GeoServer, and we provide support and training, customization for GeoServer. So it’s a pretty typical model of company monetizing open source - Red Hat or JBoss - having this Open Source core that’s based on GeoServer and other Open Source mapping projects, and then offering commercial support on top of that.

And there’s other organizations that do as well - there’s a company in Italy called GeoSolutions that also offers the same level of commercial support as well.

Rich: Where’s this project going in the future?

Justin: The current stable version of GeoServer is 2.1, and the 2.2 release is coming probably within the next six months. A few pretty major themes have been focused on for 2.2: One is the cloud and clustering - working on features that make GeoServer scale better and making it easier to deploy GeoServer in a clustered environment.

As we see GeoServer adopted by more agencies - especially government agencies at the Federal level, obviously security becomes a major concern. 2.2 comes with a complete revamp of the GeoServer security system. It allows for more flexibility for hooking up to external security system that might be in place, like LDAP servers and things like that. But also things like better password encryption.

Dealing with geospatial data means … there’s a wide variety of formats of geospatial data, so we try to support as many of them as we can. 2.2 will also come with improvements to existing formats, and also support for new formats as well.

And then the final one might be … this is pretty experimental at this stage … We’re seeing more asking for true 3-D. Typically maps that you and I are used to looking are all two-dimensional. But there are people with 3-D data out there, and they do want to visualize it on a map, so providing 3-D capabilities as well.

Rich: I’m particularly interested in the Open Street Map project. Is there any overlap whatsoever between what you’re doing and what they’re doing?

Justin: Not really. The Open Street Maps initiative is really on the data side of things, and GeoServer lives on the tool side of things. Open Street Map is this rich, really good crowdsourced data set, and then GeoServer would load Open Street Map data, and push it onto the web.

Rich: So, I could use the Open street Map data within GeoServer?

Justin: Certainly

Rich: Cool!

If I were interested in getting involved in your project … I may have some Java experience or I may not. Tell me how I could plug into what you’re doing.

Justin: There are certainly numerous levels that people can get involved. The easiest one is probably just filing bugs in the issue tracker. Whenever users report issues or problems that they’re having in the forum, we encourage them to file those as bug reports. And if they do have some programming experience we certainly encourage them to submit a patch along with that bug report.

For those that might not have coding skills we also accept documentation patches. So if you’re a user who is familiar with a certain feature, and that feature might not be documented all that well, we certainly encourage you to submit a documentation patch, and help us with continually improving the documentation.

I’ll also mention translations. GeoServer comes with a web interface for doing administration. That interface needs to be internationalized into different languages. I think we support four or five different languages now, and we’re always looking for new people to do translations.

Rich: Thanks so much for speaking with me.

Justin: Thanks a lot for having me, Rich.

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David: The problem space is one that’s been with us for a long while. I got started into this in the old days with EDI, when I first came to America, so I’ve been looking at this for over 20 years. I was one of the first to see the connection between XML and what the EDI world was doing, and we started the XML/EDI work, and that led to what we have today, with all these XML exchanges, schema, XPath, XSLT, and all these other related technologies. So in the middle of this I realized that we still weren’t answering the mail in terms of what business information exchanges need.

There’s an awful lot in XML to do with documents, graphics, web media, all that other stuff. Business transactional exchanges are somewhat of a world to themselves, in terms of … you have these very high volume transactions, you have hundreds, and potentially thousands of transaction partners, and so you have to align, and get the interoperability right.

I’ve done an awful lot of standards work both in the EDI world, and then more lately through OASIS, and in industry groups with XML. So the need to have an answer for these business communities is really what we’re focused on.

And we like solving tough problems. Everybody does. You go out there and somebody says, you can’t process a schema with XSLT and produces XML, so of course, that was the challenge.

It took us about two months to get that working and that really opened up Pandora’s box. So now we can read in any existing schema, create the template … so that’s the bottom-up approach. People didn’t have to reinvent their schemas. They could just drop them into the tool, and then boom. Now you can run interesting reports, you can diagnose what’s in the schema, find bugs. You can rewrite the schema as kind of a flattened schema, because some of these collections are really complex and will cause issues in middleware. You can create mind map models which are great for people to look at and understand what’s going on. And you can create dictionaries, spreadsheets. You can compare what’s in the schema to a dictionary, all all these other things we started adding.

You can create test cases, so you don’t have to do that by hand.

Because we have the logic in the template, we can do a lot better job of creating XML test cases than, say, an Oxygen, or an XML Spy, or a generic editor.

So that then led into us being able to create test suites for you, so now we have that. You can download the package that we have, install Ant on your system. Now you can run hundreds of test cases through the validation engine at the click of a button.

We’ve really created a very rich environment for people developing XML exchanges. What happened was that were … I particularly was involved with a US government project. I found out about this thing called NIEM - National Information Exchange Model - that the government’s using. So we put a lot of features into the toolkit to support that approach. And that’s really helped all aspects as well, not just the NIEM, but it’s very far horizontal, too. You can apply these validations and checks to your regular work - it doesn’t have to in NIEM to be really helpful.

So, stupid things like, being able to spell check the XML element names within the schema. We can do that for you. Checking, if you said it was a date, that it has a date definition on it. Consistency things like that.

Then Oracle came along and said, we really like this. We have a lot of customers that want to do NIEM, and we want to help. So they took on sponsoring the project, and provided developer resources, and that’s allowed us to really up the ante now in terms of what we’re doing. Now we have the drag and drop editor, so now you can take dictionary components from your domain, whether it be industry or government, and drag and drop those in, and actually build an exchange. That’s really powerful. SO now we’ve gone from bottom up all the way to top down.

Once you’ve built your exchange you can generate models, either mind map, or, now we’re doing UML. So now we have that piece as well.

So that’s where we are today.

We have a lot of plans for new stuff that we’re looking to do. We’re about do to a bug-fix release. We’re waiting on a few last-minute tweaks to XSLT That I need to do.

Which comes back to the other point you were making, which is that we’re very open on the project to people. Because this thing is based on XSLT and Java, it really is able to support other people contributing.

They look at, say, some of the reports that we have, or some of the handling we’re doing, and say, it would be really nice if we had this. Then they can just download some of the sample XSLT that we’ve got, follow that lead, and build out what they need.

And particularly if you’ve got a lot of XSLT skill, you’re going to really take to this quickly, I feel, because it’s so easy compared to working with the raw schemas.

Just to give an example, we were working with the folks at NIST, and they kept saying to me, we’d love to have models. We’d love to be able to do UML, and I kept saying, it’s too tough. And I had one of those aha! moments, because I picked up FreeMind. I saw their XML. A week later, Friday morning I woke up, and I thought, you know, I could write that with CAM and some XSLT. Four hours later, I had it working. Another eight hours on top of that, and we had all the Java integration working.

Now you can download Freemind, go into the editor, configure it in your preferences, hit the button, and it opens Freemind and puts your mind map up there of your mind map model. Then I got the UML working.

This is what it’s all about.

I think it’s so exciting now, because compared to 10 years ago, doing this stuff with tools - all kind of programming tools - is so much faster than it used to be. That’s the big thing that we’ve seen in the industry.

We have taken advantage of the SourceForge wiki media, and created a really nice page there for people. We’ve got an online eight minute video the folks at Oracle Media produced. If you want to know what’s it all about, and you’ve got eight minutes and can watch a vid, that’s going to just do it for you. I really recommend that people go to the site. We have it at cameditor.org, which goes to the site. You’ll see ‘Media’. Go down to ‘Tutorials’, and you’ll see the eight minute video.

Rich: Thank you so much for your time.

David: Cheers. Bye for now.

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Rich: Can you tell us what this project is about and how it got started, and what sort of images the TurnKey Linux project offers?

Liraz: A few years ago … three years ago, we noticed that there was increasing proliferation of Linux-based open source software - really great stuff - that most people we worked with had no idea even existed. And those that did … if we mentioned that, well, there’s a great piece of software for that, a lot of people will talk about, well, it’s going to be difficult to set up, or we tried that, and there was an issue, and I gave up.

Now, experts didn’t have this problem. They had a lot of experience. Even though you might be expert with one application and then you run into issues with another, and it’s just not worth the bother so you never evaluate it. And it might be perfect for the solution your’re trying to resolve.

So we were back then developing development infrastructure to put together pre-integrated Linux solutions for something else - an entirely different commercial application. We thought, wouldn’t it be neat if we took this, and used the development infrastructures to start creating pre-packaged Linux solutions for the most popular software. That was how it started - basically trying to take the expertise that would go into putting together really good Linux systems by someone who knows their doing, and glue together components that make it easier for someone who doesn’t necessarily know a lot about Linux system administration, to get things done - to get on the ground running very quickly.

Our first appliances were very basic. We did three solutions: LAMP stack, Drupal and Joomla, which are management systems. They’re very popular. And it turned out that people like the concept, and they started giving us feedback and a community started forming around the project. And we gradually introduced more solutions and updated, added new features. And eventually we got to the point where we have a library of 45 solutions which we’re now working on expanding to over 100 solutions for the next release.

That’s pretty much how the project got to the point where it is today in terms of the virtual appliance library.

There’s also some innovation on the side of … how do you … let’s say you want to start an online shop. The first step is deciding what sort of online shops software is right for you. There’s various solutions, and what we’d like to do is be able to take you from the very first stages, where you don’t necessarily know what sort of software to use, so you can evaluate the different solutions, and when you find something that’s right for you then you can very easily deploy it to the cloud. We have some features to make that much more easy than it would be with a conventional Linux system. It’s called Turnkey Backup and Migration, and it allows you to do completely automated backups and then completely automated restores, to pretty much anywhere. So you can back up a system that’s running in a virtual machine, and you can restore it a server running on real hardware, or a server running in the cloud or on the other side of the world.

That’s pretty much TurnKey in a nutshell.

Rich: I noticed that there appears to be a commercial venture that’s attached to this as well. Can you tell me something about that?

Liraz: About a year and a half ago people started talking about deploying TurnKey in the cloud. They wanted to see support for TurnKey at their favorite VPS providers, or cloud platforms. It used to be pretty difficult to do that. So we started working to see … well, it’s great if you can install a Linux system just locally, but that sort of limits your options, because most people don’t really run server software at their home. If you really want to move it into production then you’re going to want to host it somewhere. And you want to have support for hosting platform for the solution.

So we started looking for options and it turns out that Amazon, at the time, had a really good cloud infrastructure service. That made it very easy for us to plug into their system, and start offering our users the ability to deploy these solutions on Amazon. Initially we created Amazon machine images and tried letting users deploy them themselves, through the regular Amazon Web service tools. That turned out to be difficult. There were all sorts of issues.

If you’re setting up a machine on the Amazon cloud and you have to set up firewall rules and have to … you can’t have a default root password because the system is very insecure, so you’re using SSH key authentication … there are all these small issues, that, again, aren’t problematic for an expert, but somebody who isn’t an expert gets entangled in that.

So we created the TurnKey Hub, which streamlines the whole operation, and makes it very easy for you to get started using Amazon cloud - things that would’ve previously been rather difficult. As part of doing that, we also created a business model for TurnKey.

Most of the things that the TurnKey Hub provides are basically free. The service provides backup and migration - that’s completely free. We don’t make any money off of that. Dynamic DNS services, free monitoring. All that is part of the free service. But right now, it’s only cloud deployment. Say you want to deploy a server in the cloud, then we have basically two options where you you can decide if you want to pay a 10% remium to deploy your server. You pay 10% extra on top of regular Amazon Web services fee. Alternatively, we have a different plan allows you to pay a fixed rate monthly fee and then there are no premiums on usage fees.

We also provide a higher-end version of that plan that also includes support for businesses that want that kind of commitment.

That’s basically the first commercial offering that TurnKey is offering. In future we might expand that.

Right now we’d like to focus on expanding the number of solutions we provide. Also doing things like supporting Debian and supporting 64-bit which has been on the list for a while. There have been some infrastructure issues with that, but we’re finally going to solve in the next version so people can use this for higher-end applications as well. Even though that really hasn’t been a big problem up until now because most of TurnKey users have been on the low end, but once you start getting serious you want 64-bit support. That’s something we’re going to be releasing in the next version.

For an Open Source project, the community is, maybe, if not the most important aspect, one of the most important, because if you don’t have a community, then, why not be a proprietary project and have all the advantages of being able to sell your software? Why give stuff away and not have people participate, and feel they’re involved, and that this is something that they can contribute back to?

It’s really important, in our belief structure, to have people involved, and have people feel that TurnKey is something they can contribute back to. There are a few ways that users contribute right now. The easiest way is to participate in the community forums. We have community edited documentation, and our bug-tracker, and a blueprint for people to suggest features and discuss what they’d like to see in the next version, which is great.

The next level of contribution after that, which requires a bit more involvement and actual development: Right now we have a software development kit called TurnKey Linux Patch - tklpatch - we made it very easy for users to take any appliance and customize it to their kneeds. We have a core appliance that is the lowest common denominator of all our appliances. It has the basic features. The web interface. The backup and migration capability. It’s actually one of our most popular appliances, because a lot of users are taking that, and they’re just tweaking that fit their needs. Some of them are going a step further and posting their contribution back on the website, so we can discuss them. Most contributions are going to make it into the next release as new appliances, and from then on Turnkey Linux maintains that as an additional appliance.

There’s a big benefit. This is basically the advantage of Open Source in general. If you contribute back to the community, then you have to do less work in the future for yourself, because you have people who with you, and making your specific use case better, because that’s also something that are interested in.

One of our goals for this year is to take the development infrastructure that is powering Turnkey and make it public, and make it very accessible. Right now there’s the software development kit, but we want to make it possible for people to develop TurnKey appliances basically the same way we do, so this project doesn’t rely so much on our core development team, and anybody can contribute at any level.

Right now, the of source code to the appliance is public, but the fabrication system that takes that source code and assembles appliances from various package repositories - that’s something that right now we’re cleaning up, and we’d like to build an interface so people can roll their own, at the same level of the same tools, with the same power, that we have.

We’re hoping that once we do that, then can really release the labor bottleneck that has been limiting what we can do. When you depend on a small core development team everything have to go through us. We can expand to many a hundred or a hundred and fifty appliances, but there’s potential for so much more. Especially when you get to client-side applications.

There’s a ton of good client-side applications. Right now we’re only doing server-side applications, but in the next release will be releasing TurnKey client side appliance. Sort of a TurnKey appliance core, which we’d like to see as a basis for then a whole range of client-side applications. We don’t even know, necessarily, what sort of applications are going to be eventually successful. People are going to be really interested in, even though there are few that are probably obvious, such as rescue disks, kiosks, stuff like that, and maybe privacy distributions. Who knows? Once you get the tools out there, and people can use them freely then you can just let innovation happen. And then things that people are interested in, they’ll flock towards.

We want to create an ecosystem. An infrastructure that is completely open-source, where people can feel that they belong and contribute back to. TurnKey can get to the point where it really lives up to the potential we think this approach has.

Rich: Thanks so much for talking with me. I wish you a whole bunch of success with your project.

Liraz: We’re really excited. It’s been a lot of fun so far. Thanks for having me. I hope your listeners check out our website and maybe try one of appliances, then tell us what they think.

Rich: Thanks so much.

Liraz: Bye bye.

SourceForge is delighted to announce that the February Project Of The Month is Boost. Boost provides free, portable, peer-reviewed C++ libraries. In order to tell us what that means, and what the goal of the Boost project is, and where it’s going in the future, I called Dave Abrahams, who’s been involved with the project almost since the beginning.

(See previous POTM winners.)

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Related links:

Boost Project Page
BoostCon/C++ Now Conference
BoostPro Computing

Let’s start by defining what this project is. What is Boost? What does it do? What problems set does it try to solve?

Dave: Boost is a free collection of C++ libraries. Our original intention was to build libraries suitable for incorporation into the C++ language standard and we’ve actually been quite successful with that. Most of the libraries in the new C++ 11 standard came through Boost. The idea was to get the libraries into the hands of as many users as possible, so that we could make sure that what got standardized was actually well tested in the field. Boost has now grown well beyond our original idea for it. There are over 112 libraries in Boost 1.48. They cover all kinds of domains from ensure general utilities to frameworks for high performance computing. All kinds of stuff. Many of these things, we don’t ever expect to standardize. They’re maybe too specialized. But many C++ programmers consider Boost an indispensable tool. It’s become sort of a de-facto standard.

Rich: For those of us from a different sector of the programming community, would you say that this is kind of like CPAN or PEAR?

Dave: That’s really interesting. It’s different from CPAN and PEAR in one important way, which is that Boost has a peer-review process for adding new libraries to the collection. We don’t have the kind of incredible variety and sprawl of projects that you see in CPAN, but then again, we also have probably a higher standard of quality control. There’s certain requirements that everything needs to have to get into Boost. And we have an automated test that runs regressions for all of the libraries in the collection. It’s a little more organized than CPAN. And I think that made a huge difference in getting adoption, because people have really grown to rely on the stability and quality of the code in Boost.

Rich: Do you feel that’s what contributed to people adopting the non-standard libraries.

Dave: Yes, there’s that. The fact that it’s free, with non-viral licensing was a huge point. And the incredible community of programmers that grew up around this project - it’s made a huge difference in people wanting to use it and wanting to participate.

Rich: Were you involved all the way at the beginning?

Dave: The very beginning was started with Beman Dawes, who was the chairman of the C++ committee’s library working group at the time. He got a bunch of us together right after the first standard came out, and started to talk to us about where are we going to get the libraries for the next standard? Where are they going to come from, and where are we going to get libraries that actually have a lot of usage experience behind them? Because we wanted to be sure that those kinds of things were proven.

The very first participants in Boost were all people who were associated with the C++ committee. Since then it’s sprawled out into a community so big I can’t really keep track of it.

Rich: Looking at the list of libraries there are a huge number of them, and I’m downloading them … it’s 95 meg of source code.

Dave: <laughs>

Rich: Does the documentation tend to keep pace with this? Do people know which libraries they’re going to want?

Dave: That’s always hard. I do training in Boost. And when I do that, I tell people to take the libraries a few at a time. There’s a base set of very broadly useful libraries, that just about everybody will want. So if you start with those, it gets a lot more approachable.

Another thing that you can do that will help if you’re feeling it’s a bit of a hump to get over, we have a conference every year - BoostCon - which we’ve actually extended this year into “C++ Now” in honor of the new standard.

Rich: What kind of an audience is the conference geared towards?

Dave: It’s been geared towards the audience of interested and interesting people that show up around Boost. It’s kind of hard to define them. We’ve had people who are less experienced, but I would say that as a rule most of people that show up are extremely bright, and that makes for a really interesting conference. We do this every year in Aspen, Colorado, by the way, in the Spring, and it’s one of the best conferences that everybody says that they go to every year. We get the same people coming back over and over again. It’s geared toward anyone who’s a Boost user or a Boost developer. That’s where we get the face-to-face collaboration that so many of us miss when we’re doing the the online, remote collaboration thing.

Rich: With the new version of the C++ standard out last year, what are the plans of the Boost project with regards to that?

Dave: I think we’re going to keep on doing what we had been doing. We’re going to keep reviewing and accepting new libraries.

We’re going through a phase where the project has expanded so much that the original ways we had of thinking about things may not apply anymore. One of the things we’re trying to do is modularize it. You were talking about how there was 90 MB of downloads to get the source for Boost. One of the things that were working on right now is modularizing it, because most people don’t want to use every library all the time. People want to be able to pick and choose.

We also think that it will help decouple the development process for all of our developers a bit more. Make it a little more freeing to work in, because it’s a really big code base now.

Rich: Are there other projects that are in the same space? I’m kind of aware of the Apache standard C++ project but I don’t know much about it. Are they doing a similar thing, or is that different?

Dave: My recollection is that the Apache project was actually just trying to implement the existing standard, whereas Boost’s mission has always been about exploring what can be done with C++ libraries, and providing new things that aren’t in the standard.

So, let’s see, other libraries in this space? Well, actually, one thing that you might consider similar would be the Adobe Source Libraries. This is a set of Open Source libraries which are actually built on top of Boost. They cover the same sort of broad spectrum of different applications.

Rich: You’re part of a company called BoostPro, is that right?

Dave: That’s right.

Rich: You do training. What else do you?

Dave: We do both Open- and closed-source software development. We a lot of training - that’s one of our main things. We’re focusing a lot on training in C++ 11 because there’s new language standard out which changes everything. And we’re doing a lot of compiler development these days too, because one of our partners has a lot of experience with that, and a lot of connections in that world.

Rich: Thanks so much for speaking with me.

Dave: Thanks a lot, it was my pleasure.

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Rich: This is Rich Bowen and I’m speaking with Chris Laurel who is a member of the Celestia project. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. Tell me something about Celestia. Tell us what it does and tell us how you got involved in this project.

Chris: Celestia is about 10 years old as of … well, actually it’s about 11 years old now, and I started it after leaving a job and taking some time off. I wanted to keep doing something related to my field, which is 3-D graphics programming. And I wanted to do something with 3D graphics that was something beyond just a game. I wanted to demonstrate that there’s some usefulness to the 3-D graphics beyond special effects for movies and games. And so, I decided to create Celestia. The other reason is that I’ve had a lifelong interest in astronomy and I always wondered what would be like actually stand on the surface of what the moons of Jupiter. This was right around the time that were starting to get some of these extrasolar planet discoveries and wondered what would the sky look like from the surface of these planets we were finding around other stars.

And so the desire to make something useful with 3D graphics plus my interest in … wondering what it would look like to be in these places was what made me develop Celestia.

Celestia is a 3-D planetarium that lets you look at the universe from any point in space and at any particular time. So you can see the motions of planets around our sun. You can zoom away from our sun and see thousands of stars near by in 3 dimensions. You can zoom out further and see our galaxy and where it is located relative to other nearby galaxies. You can observe the motions of planets in time and the motions of binary stars orbiting each other. It’s really meant to give you this broad view of the universe - this visual experience

Rich: Where does your data come from?

Chris: We have a lot of sources. There’s no single catalog that covers all these different objects. Stars are from the European space agency Hipparcos mission. This is to date the only large catalog of stars that has their distances measured. It turns out that accurately measuring the position of star in the sky is very easy but measuring the distance requires extremely high precision. So far the only catalog available is the Hipparcos catalog.

The orbits of the planets come from different sources. There’s something called the VSOP 87 which is this complex theory for the orbits of the planets in our solar system. Then there are other theories for the orbits of the moons around planets.

The surfaces of the planets and moons are derived from images acquired by missions to various planets. Voyager, Cassini, the Viking Mission to Mars. Pretty much all the interplanetary missions in the last couple decades have contributed in some way to Celestia.

Rich: Is all of that data free?

Chris: Yes, it’s all free. This is all scientific data, and it’s all generated by these government supported agencies like NASA and the European space agency and JAXA from Japan. And they all make this data freely available so that scientists can analyze it and then write papers and learn things about our universe.

Rich: What kind of things do you have in the pipeline for future versions of Celestia.

Chris: I think one of the most important things right now is sorting out the user interface a little bit. A common complaint about the Celestia is that it’s extremely hard to figure out all the different non-obvious keyboard commands that are required to navigate around the universe. That’s an area where Celestia needs some development. And then we always want to improve the visual qualities of Celestia - just improve the graphics, make it look more realistic, take advantage of some of the new features are available in 3-D graphics hardware that were not available when we started 10 years ago.

Rich: I noticed while looking through the release history that there’s a two year gap, about 2009 until early this year. What inspired you to pick the project back up and start releasing versions again?

Chris: It’s free software so I don’t make money from Celestia. There’s times when I have to work on other projects and I get busy with those. When I have more free time available, I do more work on the project. There are other people that are also working on Celestia. I’m certainly not the only developer. They have similar time constraints. We’re all doing this for fun. We don’t get paid. When we have time available, we work on it. But unfortunately as you’ve noticed, we don’t have enough time to be constantly updating it. So there’s gaps.

Rich: Yeah, one never does.

Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your project, what sort of openings might there be?

Chris: Celestia supports these add-ons which are our packages of data about planets galaxies and stars, that you can use to expand the universe in Celestia. And so we’re always looking for people to take new data sets from planetary missions or from telescopic missions, and importing that into Celestia to expand the universe of Celestia. Make sure we have all the latest, and most accurate, and most complete data available.

Rich: Tell me some more about these plug-ins. How many contributors do you have for that? What sort of data they brought to the project?

Chris: Maybe 100 people or so have contributed add-ons and made them publicly available. I know they’re quite a few more people that create these things just for their organizations or for their own entertainment. There’s a site called the Celestia Motherlode where a lot of people have uploaded these add-ons. Things you can find there are high-resolution planet textures, 3-D models of asteroids and spacecraft, and the trajectories of the spacecraft. So you can follow the New Horizon’s mission to Pluto or the MSL - the Curiosity mission to Mars. Catalogs of comets. Then there are things that are more speculative, such as … people will take the known data about an extra-planetary system, and expand on it and produce their own imagined surfaces for these planets around other stars. And then there’s a lot of people that like to use it to take spacecraft from Star Trek or something like that …

Rich: [laughs] I was going to ask that.

Chris: Yeah. There are a lot of people doing that, and that’s certainly not something that we have in the base Celestia package which is all completely reality-based. If people want to use it to live their favorite science fiction series or movie that’s great.

Rich: That’s pretty cool. I was just going to ask if anyone was using it for fictional stuff.

Chris: Yeah, in fact some of the Star Trek models in particular have gotten very detailed, and really well done. It’s cool stuff, even though it’s not not my domain.

Rich: My wife and I are big Trek fans. Maybe I’ll play with that some.

Chris: You absolutely should. The Trek stuff is great. We have some very devoted Trek fans who are Celistia users.

One thing I’d like to say is that we’re pretty careful about what data we allow in Celestia. We try to keep it very realistic and don’t enhance anything. But we have to make some guesses in a few places, such as these extrasolar planets. We have some speculation as to what they look like, but we can’t see them from Earth right now. We don’t have telescopes that are powerful enough. So we sort of have to make some guesses there. But in general, there’s very little speculation involved in the visuals in Celestia.

I always like to emphasize this is … just because I’m talking about Celestia doesn’t mean I’m the the sole developer by any means. We’ve had a lot of people contributing over the last decade on the project, and not just in creating add-ons, but a lot of work on the code a lot of work on the very complex process of taking these scientific data sets and turning them into something you can visualize in your PC. I always like to make sure that credit is given here.

Rich: Thanks so much for talking to me.

Chris: Thank you, and have fun exploring Celestia!

As the name suggests, MuseScore is musical software for the creation and editing of musical scores. It has a wide variety of tools for creating scores with multiple instruments, multiple voices, inserting lyrics, and all sorts of related functionality.

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So here’s my conversation with Thomas and Nicholas.

Rich: I’ve been playing with MuseScore this morning and, I have to say I’m really impressed with it. I remember about 10 years ago looking for some exactly like this. A friend of mine was working with a small choir, and he was looking for a way to do this sort of score creation. We couldn’t find anything all. This would have been perfect at the time and it’s a very impressive piece of software.

Are you two the whole team or is there a larger team of developers working on this?

Thomas: There’s one more person who is missing. His name is Werner Schweer. He comes from Germany. He’s the lead developer of MuseScore, and he started with it in 2002, or something like that. So we are nine years, actually almost 10 years later. And now we have a contributor community of one hundred fifty people, or even more. Those are people contributing code, or translations, or documentation, or graphics, and so on and so on. So it’s quite a lot of people now.

Rich: I saw on the website a map of schools that are using this. What kind of stories do you have about people using this in instruction?

Thomas: Actually we don’t know that much about schools using MuseScore, other than, well, they just installed the software on their PCs or or even 100 PCs, or even more, and then they use it with the students. We do have some feedback sometimes. Some teachers shared a video with us while he was teaching MuseScore, but other that that it’s sometimes a lot of mystery for us how MuseScore is being used within classrooms. So other than the map, we don’t have that much feedback actually.

Rich: I’m always interested to see how open source is used specifically in education directly with the students. Do you have any of those students come back and participate in the community after having experienced the software?

Thomas: Yes. So, obviously, we have quitea vibrant community website on the MuseScore.org. We see lots of people asking questions there. But it’s not so much about the use-case being student or being teachers, just about while asking how the software works for doing this or doing that. So far we have, like, 20,000 people registered on MuseScore.org. The forum is very lively, so people by now know if they have a problem, they can post it, and within one hour they have answers. So that’s really great. The live support is probably one of our strongest points and that’s something that people don’t expect of Open Source software. They expect that they won’t be able to get support, and as soon as they have tasted the support, the live support of the community, it’s like, whoa, it’s super great. That’s one of the points we really excel on.

R I was looking for sheet music that I could download, and I found a lot of classical music that is in the public domain but do you see people using this for original composition as well?

Thomas: Yes, for both actually. Composition as well as for transcribing existing music by ear or copying it from paper, like lots of public domain stuff. It’s hard to say what the distribution is between the three of them, but we almost say it’s kind of equal. Mostly people who have their sheet music on paper, they want to do one thing, and it’s transpose. So they copy it over into MuseScore and transpose. Lots of music composition students who want to share the stuff online and get feedback on how they can improve and so on, and then people just transcribing by ear because they don’t have sheet music, and mostly these are teachers who want to transcribe and pass on the music to students. These are the three big groups that use MuseScore.

Nicholas: Maybe another one is … a lot of people arranging for choir, and glee, and marching bands, and churches. A lot of people use it in churches.

Rich: Are the two of you musicians yourselves?

Nicholas: Sure. I’m a drummer.

Thomas: I’m a piano player, and our lead developer is a piano player as well.

Rich: So you all are developing this for your own personal use, then?

Nicholas: Yes, sure.

Thomas: Indeed.

Rich: What sort of things are planned for future versions of the software?

Thomas: For MuseScore … what we call 2.0, it’s the next major release, we plan to broaden up our market a bit, in the sense that we don’t have the guitar players right now, because guitar players, a lot of them use tablature. Tablature will be supported in MuseScore 2.0. That’s obviously a large chunk of the market.

And then, on the other side, we also want to get a bit more into the high-end, and those are people composing or transcribing big orchestral scores, and for them we have linked part editing, which means that you can just edit one specific part while the full orchestral score just follows along if you want. So you have it all in and one score you can easily edit your whole orchestral score.

We cover all kinds of instruments and all kinds of instrument players, so MuseScore 2.0 is about targeting everyone. That’s the main goal for MuseScore 2.0.

Nicholas: Something we want to do as well is make it look nicer. Make a better design of the UI. We haven’t gotten complaints, but some people say it doesn’t look good. Or not good enough.

Thomas: We have to compete with commercial software, and of course commercial software like Sibelius and Finale are our biggest competitors, and they are in the market already 20 years now. So we’re still pretty young, and in order to appeal to all people, we have to make the software even more easy to use, and the UI and UX is something that we have to work on. And as often with Open Source, that’s something that doesn’t happen magically, like what is happening with the code itself. So we might have to push a bit on that. That means paying a designer. So if there are designers listening along and wants to help us on this, we might just start a KickStarter project, and raise some money from the community and pay a designer with it, because so far in all these years we haven’t had a professional designer stepping on board and trying to make the software better.

Rich: When someone is entering a piece of music what are the different ways that one can enter that music? Obviously you can edit it on the screen but there is a MIDI interface as well, is that correct?

Nicholas: That’s correct. You can do it with a mouse, you just click on the lines or between the lines, to put your notes. You can do it with the keyboard of the computer as well. You press the notes, C, D, E, F, and so on. And there are some shortcuts to change the octave, and move the notes on different lines. And you can do it with a MIDI keyboard. When you do it with a MIDI keyboard. When you do it with a MIDI keyboard, some people expect that you just play, and the music display on the screen magically. This is not the case. You play the chords, or you play the notes, and you change the rhythm with the computer keyboard.

Thomas: That’s called step entry mode.

To add something to your question of what’s next for the future - a the moment, MuseScore is a desktop app. It’s kind of limited, if you see that the mobile stuff is just taking off rapidly now. And so one of things that we envision as well for the future is that we bring MuseScore not only to mobile, but also to the Web. From the desktop, to the Web, to mobile, and launch some kind of hub. Actually last year we launched MuseScore.com, and it’s a sister website for MuseScore.org, where all MuseScore users can make an account and upload their sheet music to, and then share with the people they want to share with, and of course having all the sheet music in their proper account on MuseScore.com, could also be able then to load it into their mobile devices. Currently we’re making mobile applications for IOS and Android, and more is to come. And software is Open Source as well. So this is in fact a call to developers - if you want to make an app using sheet music, than they could use a library within the MuseScore project, which they can just use inside their own application in order to display the sheet music, to play it back, to transpose it, to play a few parts, and so on and so on. So that’s something for the future as well.

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R: Thanks so much for speaking with me today.

Brian: Yeah, thanks for having me.

R: Tell me about the ProcessMaker project: what sort of problem space you’re trying to address, and what your product does.

B: ProcessMaker is Open Source business process management tool, which is a discipline probably better known as workflow. ProcessMaker really focuses on automating approval based in a form driven workflows. Basically we;re sort of streamlining bureaucracies. Any time you’ve got an organization with 80 on up to thousands, people want to get things approved. They make requests and ProcessMaker generally looks for processes that have the word “request” or “approval” in it. So, a credit request or an employee onboarding request or leave of absence request. Anything that’s some kind of approval, request-based workflow is perfect for automating in ProcessMaker. It gives a business analyst, or business user, a visual environment for designing visually the process with the steps required - how it flows through the organization, and then adding in forms. Also the visual form designer outputs documents which might be these sorts of PDFs or Word documents, contract, invoices, things of that nature. So, it’s really about automating these kinds of approval workflows which happen again and again in enterprises.

R: Tell us about the relationship between the Open Source side and the commercial side and how that works together and what’s in one and not in the other.

B: There’s a company that I work for called Colosa. Colosa is the main sponsor of the project and has a core group of developers are part of Colosa. The primary product the full product is Open Source under the GPL version 3 license and then we also develop add-ons around it. Community members also develop add-ons as part of subscriptions where we’ll will provide support for the product and the additional add-ons to the product, and besides that we also provide services, as do many companies around the globe, that helped other companies automate their processes.

R: Do you have developers that work on the Open Source project full-time?

B: Yeah, we’ve got about eight developers currently that just work on the core Open Source product full time. Then we have another small team of probably two developers that developed these plug-ins. We have a specific plug-in architecture and then we look for areas where we can add some value and offer those as plug-ins inside of these enterprise subscriptions. Again them main purpose of enterprise subscriptions is so that those that want professional support around it can get it and also get some value added that with additional features.

R: Which came first: the Open Source product or the company?

B: Good question. The company came first. The company Colosa has been around since 2000. We were originally doing something else. It was related, and in the area of insurance. So we we originally worked on some insurance related projects and insurances is an industry that has a lot of workflows. So we realized that really what we were doing was developing workflows. So we decided in about 2006 to begin, trying to orient this a more generic and general fashion to create an Open Source product around it. And then it went on SourceForge in February 2008.

R: Was it Open Source to begin, or you you developed it in-house and then Open Source it?

B: We had developed parts of it in-house, and never explicitly had a license agreement around it so then we went back and redeveloped it and then said, let’s release this officially under a license. So we had developed parts of it but really not as as a coherent product. So that took a while to do, and then we released that.

R: I’m always interested in the process where a company take something internal and makes it Open Source. How did that go? Did you have lawyers that were nervous about it or was it pretty much smooth, or how did that process work out?

B: It was actually very smooth. I had had spent a lot of time the year prior going to different conferences and calling members and leaders of other Open Source projects to understand better how Open Source works, because I was kind of new to it at the time. And because we had been working mostly in PHP, that’s when we thought we were really part a larger community that does gravitate towards Open Source, and we should be participating in a bigger way in that. And so it was natural for us to do that. And because all the development we had done would have been very specific to clients, we sort of thought we had nothing to lose. There’s lots of literature out there saying what were the right reasons and the wrong reasons for looking towards open Source, but it worked very well for us.

R: Now you’re on the other side of that and the project is Open Source. Are the developers that work on the project … are they all from within the company or do you also have developers that contribute regularly that are outside the company.

B: We started of course the core development and now we have a community of about 5000 members. All of the language packs have been contributed by members. We are getting more add-ons and plug-ins contributed by members. A few contributions around the core - not too much yet but that’s starting to happen. So we’ve seen that process growing as users and developers become more involved. One of the interesting things about about ProcessMaker is, because it’s really a toolset for business analysts, we also have the ability for non technical people to contribute in the way of processes - contributing best practice processes and then sort of showing others how they’ve done maybe a credit request, or an employee onboarding process. So there’s two ecosystems of contributors there: one at the process level and one at the programming level. One of the unique things - there’s other workflow and business process management solutions and other Open Source ones - one of the interesting things is that this is a PHP based product and really the only one out there and so it kind of gives a different level of accessibility. We’ve seen developers and companies around the world who are gravitating towards ProcessMaker because they realize that there’s more talent, at a lower cost than say Java solutions out there. And our approach to is very different so as more developers are asked to develop systems with a CMS or based on another CRM, we become an interesting player there and an interesting solution because people can get up to speed very quickly and it looks and feels more like other things that worked in before.

R: Where is the product going in future revisions and specifically, if somebody wanted to get involved at this point, what sort of things might they be interested in working on?

B: We’re members of the organizations that are interested in BPM. One of them is the OMG. Another one is the workflow management coalition - the WFMC. There’s a standard around BPM called “Business Process Modeling Notation“. In August of 2010 OMG released BPMN 2.0. It’s interesting is that it’s explicitly a semantic language that not only allows you to visually draw the process but it’s meant so that providers that are doing the drawing can draw and then you could export that in BPMN 2.0 compliant XML and later import it into another modeler or another engine. So let’s say you wanted to use the ProcessMaker modeler, but Oracle’s BPM engine you can do that or vice versa, when everybody fully supports the standard. That’s still taking a while for big vendors. It’s taking them longer because they’ve got a big install bases. But it’s also creating a bigger ecosystem, so those that are interested more in simulation or analytics, this idea of exporting and importing and eventually getting to the level what you could export and import multiple times and eventually get what they call a round trip with your your BPMN model. It’s an exciting time for the industry because of that.

We now have in our beta have really the only BPMN 2.O. editor - JavaScript-based editor - in the world. It’s pretty interesting notation designed to really create a common language for those that are trying to design and describe processes. We’re working heavily on that and are putting that into the product. We’re also working on better support for multiple databases. Currently ProcessMaker runs on MySQL. It’s a PHP product, as I mentioned. The BPMN piece is kind of big area in the industry and that’s really what our main focus is, and I think that for those that want to get involved, there’s lots of opportunity. We’re always interested, and would welcome more contributions in the core.

The plug-in architecture, we’ve recently documented that, so I think now in our wiki - users have been screaming for that for years - now they can come study that and figure out how to develop plug-ins that can do other things. We’ve done things for - around digital signatures, around integration with other solutions, and I think there’s just a lot of ways that people can go with that.

R: What are some of the products in the commercial space that are doing what you’re doing?

B: Well the big players in the commercial space would be IBM, SAP, and probably Oracle. I think IBM claims to have the biggest lion’s share of the market. But it’s an extremely fragmented market and in fact I’d say the number one competitive element in the market is custom programs. So other people build things not realizing maybe they could build them more quickly, or maintain them more easily with with a business process management framework, or workflow product. So it’s an interesting arena because there are lots of different solutions but each one is a little bit different. They haven’t been very monetized at this point.

R: Tell me what particular applications you’ve seen this put to in the real world - how people are using it, and especially how people might be using it in ways you didn’t anticipate.

B: As I mentioned, it’s a product meant for large organizations and our sweet spot tends to be maybe 100 employees to maybe four or five thousand employees. So any larger organizations that have this problem of how to coordinate better between employees regarding approval-based processes. Outside the US we’ve found an interesting niche with ProcessMaker in banks. Large banks in Eastern Europe and Canada. A number in Latin America, a number in Africa. And they sort of drive value because they can put 10, 20, 30 different processes on the platform. Everything from a check approval request, to some kind of incoming wire transfer, conciliation requests, all these sorts of requests and approval-based processes on the platform. And a because you can develop custom processes, each one is doing something unique. And that’s why they need a platform that allows them to build what they currently have. That sector, government, lots of government projects. We just saw a big USAID projects in Peru with the Peruvian government done with ProcessMaker. We’re about … we have a Colosa customer in the UK that’s launching a big government project in UK right now. And then cross enterprize, so any kind of manufacturing company that wants to add value or do custom work on top of existing ERP’s that’s another big area. Telcos - we have a number of telcos in different countries around the world using it as well. And probably some of the bigger names - Lenovo, the laptop maker uses ProcessMaker. Toyota in India uses ProcessMaker. Those are probably some of the more recognizable names. Universities as well. Lehman College from Sunni systems is using ProcessMaker. Kind of across the board in any large organization.

R: Thanks for after speaking with me today, Brian.

B: Thanks, Rich.

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Rich: This is Rich Bowen. I’m speaking with David Brookes from the LEAF project. Thanks for speaking with me today. Could you give us an overview of what the LEAF project is, and what its goals are, and how the project got started to begin with?

David: Sure, Rich. Let me have a go at doing that. I must point out that I’m one of the newbies on the project, so I can’t claim to have been around since the very inception. I’m going to try to speak on behalf of my co-developers, and give a view of what we’re trying to achieve with the LEAF project.

The first thing to say is that LEAF is an acronym. It’s stands for Linux Embedded Appliance Framework. Really those words do capture the essence of what we’re about doing.

Linux, obviously.

Embedded, as in, we do target running Linux on some fairly low-end machines. Right now we are looking only at X86 hardware. That’s what we run on. Pretty much the smallest X86 machine you can think of will happily run the LEAF distribution.

Right now we’re looking at the moment at expanding the supported hardware - CPU chipsets - to run on other devices. The X86 hardware isn’t really at the low end of the scale any more. There are other alternatives that are rather smaller, rather less resource-intensive in terms of power. But right now it’s X86. Really going back a few years when the LEAF project got started up - when it was spawned from other initiatives - it was targeting very low-end X86 hardware, and for a long time we had the ambition of running off of a single floppy disk. So it was fairly a low resource requirement, very small distribution, to fit and boot off of a single floppy, and then run from memory once it had booted, and make efficient use of the kind of hardware that was around, about the year 2000 kind of time scales.

Appliance is that although there’s a focus on firewalling, network routing, that kind of functionality, it is a more generic platform. So really anything you can do with Linux, you can do with a LEAF distribution.

The Framework part of the name touches on that same thing. It is extensible as a framework. It isn’t just for networking and firewalling, although those are focus for it. Other solutions, network based, around file servers, around PBX, voice over IP, other solutions based on the same platform are eminently feasible with the basic distribution.

In terms of what it will do - it will do anything that a standard Linux distribution will do. It is low-end in terms of its demands on resources. Pretty high performance, as best we can get it given those constraints, and pretty flexible.

It is tailored, in its bare distributions, for various network based purposes, but it is extensible beyond that.

R: I saw something on the website about wireless access points. I used to have a flashable WAP. Is it used for that as well?

D: It’s used for that kind of purpose. Not as part of any commercial offerings as far as I’m aware. But if you look at the technology that’s used, I certainly see equivalent componentry in terms of the software applications that run on access points from 3Com, other people, the same kinds of solutions get used that we have available within LEAF. And certainly people are successfully able to build wireless access points.

R: The other thing I noticed on the website is that you mention several forks of your code base, other distributions of it. What’s the philosophy there regarding other distributions of your base?

D: That’s a good question. It really dates back to the early days of the LEAF project - back to about the year 2000. There’s quite a nice diagram on the website that talks about how various projects have merged together and then forked away. One of the initial projects that we based the LEAF solution on was the Linux Router Project (LRP), and personally that’s how I came across LEAF. I initially started about 1999 using LRP to use my own router, and stuck with it for a while. Then I was aware that LRP wasn’t being actively developed, after the year 2000, or maybe 2001, and that the LEAF team were developing LEAF Bering that I then switched to.

There were then various evolutions. What tends to happen is that there’s an initiative to make a fairly major change. For example, there was a change from using conventional libc to micro libc or uclibc, which is now used for the main active branch of the project. These major changes happen, and then things stabilize. The developers and users get to be happy with what’s happening. Then there’s another requirement to change the status quo because maybe people have different ambitions. That’s happened quite recently.

My active involvement has been quite recent. Perhaps the last two years or so, where the version 3 of Bering uclibc was stable, working fine for a lot of people. Based on the Linux kernel version 2.4, which did impose certain constraints. It was constraining some of the functionality, especially around IPv6, and some of the firewalling. And some of the add-on applications were constrained in terms of the versions that were compatible with that 2.4 kernel.

The version 4 of the project now, which has the 2.6 kernel, has caught up with some of the key software components like Shorewall firewall. We were quite far behind in terms of the version of that we were using, and we’ve managed to catch up with that.

What we’ve found is that the footprint of the solution has grown quite dramatically. The 2.6 kernel is a lot bigger than the 2.4 kernel. The new versions of Shorewall actually rely on Perl. It’s a cut-down Perl installation but it is a Perl installation, which is more resource intensive both in terms of disk space and runtime space. That has meant that the aspiration of fitting on a single floppy disk has had to go out the window. But then again, there’s no real user-base out there that relies on floppy disks any more. We’re in a compact flash world, and other physical disk media have taken over.

That was a big change both in the developer community, and in the focus - not so much the focus of the project, but the focus in terms of removing some of the constraints and some of the policies of being very small, and focusing more on performance than on very very small size.

R: Where do you see the project going in coming years? What sort of additional functionality are you going to try to put in there.

D: Functionality-wise, I think we’re already pretty rich. I think in terms of the number of packages, it’s getting on to the 200 individual application packages that are available. We do find that people add to those, so as different developers have a requirement to run a new application, or maybe switch from one bit of technology to another bit of technology, they’ll add another package and grow the functionality that way. That’s organic evolution of extra bits of solution being added on, rounding out the the functionlity available in the framework.

There’s also the change of the lock-in to the X86 CPU set. That’s an active development right now, to go from compiling on X86 for X86 to compiling on X86 for ARM, or other processors. That will open up a much wider range of hardware. And actually rather cheaper hardware. One of the constraints right now is that for the low-power hardware, it tends to be quite expensive. Embedded X86 solutions tend to be reasonably expensive because they’re quite low volume production. Whereas there are other alternatives out there that are a lot more affordable. We’d like to target those. That does give us challenges in terms of the compillation environment. With all of the projects doing cross-compillation, we’re quite sensitive to how the developers of the applications have written their makefiles, and it’s tough to give a completely isolated build environment for some of the applications without the host libraries and other things leaking in. That is going to be a challenge for us to make that switch to a much more clean cross-compillation thing to do. That’s quite a keen thing to do, and I think it will open the project up to a wider userbase, and a wider set of use cases for different applications.

R: It’s always kind of cool for me to see these projects that have been around for ten plus years and are still active. I’m always kind of curious when a project decides that they’re done, and there’s nothing else to do. It’s cool to see that this project is not only active, but still bringing in new developers with fresh ideas.

D: It is cool, and I think that that’s what keeps it alive in some respects. What I’ve found is that the developers - there aren’t that many, we’d like to have more developers, I guess other projects would do - we all seem to have the same kind of ideas, we think the same way about things. As with many of these projects, it’s cool to work with people who have the same kind of ambitions. And we do work well together as a team. We’re quite complimentary in how we focus on different areas, we take responsibility in different areas, and then support each other in other areas.

It almost feels like there have been a number of generations of the LEAF project, handing over from one generation to the next as new developers come on board with new ideas, and the ability to spend quite a lot of time in some cases. Some of the guys devote quite a lot of time to developing the project. There’s a wider community that can benefit from their involvement and investment, and their work.

R: You mentioned that there’s always room for developers. What areas of the project are itching for that new blood?

D: There’s the things that I’ve got on my list:

I think projects always tend to struggle with documentation. That’s certainly one thing that I’ve been trying to contribute.

I’m not really a deep development person. I’ve done software development for about 25 years, or thereabouts. I don’t claim that I’m the world’s best software developer. Because of things I do in my real job, and the things that I do for myself … I’m using a new bit of technology, or a new system, I do tell myself to write down documentation for my own benefit, so that I don’t forget the next time, so I can reinstall something, or understand why I chose to configure things the way that I did. It’s quite a small step for me then to contribute that to the wider community, and write it for a wider audience. So I’ve done some work on the documentation, bringing it up to date for the new version 4 of the project.

We used to use the DocBook technology for our documentation. It’s good technology, but I think it puts quite a few people off from contributing to it. It wasn’t that easy to do a simple change. You had to change a file, and them make sure that it’s complient with the schema and that kind of thing.

We took a fairly bold step, which I instigated, to move to a wiki-based documentation platform, which makes it easier for people to contribute to, and easy to make minor changes to. I think that has proved quite valuable in terms of … I make a minor change if I spot a typo or some slight error I’ll go fix that, as do the other developers as well.

There is quite a lot of documentation. There are quite a lot of undocumented features. There’s quite a lot of packages without any documentation. And I moved across some of the older documentation without doing much in the way of validation of that or improvement of that.

So that’s one area where we can always use new people.

The other thing I’d say is testing. That’s one of our weakness. We don’t have a full test harness. We can do some fairly major surgery to the kernel, or other parts of the distribution, and we don’t have an easy way of checking that it still works for all of the wide range of functionality that we have. I’d be delighted if someone contribute something something more around a formal test harness, or some sort of regression test scripts. Either a very small contribution there, or a bigger contribution, would be pretty neat.

Other things, I’d say, which are open to contribution from other people, is that we were constrained by using the 2.4 kernel for a while. In moving to the 2.6 kernel we’ve had some of the brakes removed in terms of updates of some of the application packages. I’m aware that we haven’t actually gone around all of the packages and done the updates. Right now we are distributing some pretty old upstream application versions. It would be nice for someone to go through and just check on those, which ones are out of date, which ones could be updated.

And then the other thing that we are working on at the moment, that is maybe another top priority, is that there is a web interface for administration of a LEAF system which does give quite a good view of a running system in terms of status. It’s not fully featured in terms of administration updates. I tend to use a command line - I’ll ssh into a box and use the command line menus that we have for administration, as do many of the developers. In terms of entry point for new users, I know that the command line world does tend to put people off, and a lot of the users tend to rely on the web interface. We can always improve on that. I wouldn’t claim that it’s a very advanced web interface. It’s designed for low-power devices, so it’s not that clever in terms of the technology on the back-end. But I know some other projects have got something more flashy on the front end. So there’s some options there for lowering the bar for new users coming on board, because right now it’s not that friendly for a new user. The documentation is helping out in some respects on that, but there’s always more we can do to try and make it real easy for a new user to come on board and get up to speed quickly.

The other core developers … we’re all over the place. This is very much a global project. It’s not the case of there being a small team that has worked together. We’ve all come to LEAF and found LEAF as a good cause to contribute to. We have core developers in Germany and other parts of Europe. Some in the US. I’m based in England. It’s quite good to have people coming from different countries, different cultures, and contributing to the same goal.

The other thing I would say is that I have a day job. I’m not doing this as a day job. I have a day job working in IT. I have a bit of a history in software development. I’m not a developer any more.

One of the reasons I do contribute some time to this project is that it keeps me grounded. These days I’m specifying systems, working with other people, getting teams to do work on my behalf. I’m getting to be the more senior person in my day job. But it’s always good to know where the technology’s at, what’s practical in terms of availability or performance or reliability of solution. Certainly I’ve found that with Linux, it’s a solid platform. I think the industry has now woken up to that. For a while it was seen as a flaky, hobby kind of project, and it’s not the case really. And with LEAF I find that it’s a very stable platform.

Being a developer I do tend to rebuild to new versions pretty frequently, and reboot more often than others would do, but I know that a lot of users have had LEAF running for literally years on end without a reboot. It’s a pretty solid platform. And pretty secure. You can cut it down and be a very limited set of installed files, which therefore makes it quite secure, which is obviously great for a network based security focused installation.

I must thank one of my colleagues based in Germany who felt his English wasn’t good enough to actually speak up on this call. To be honest he does a lot more work on LEAF than I do and he gave me some very useful notes for this session, so I’m plagiarizing some of his comments, and using some of mine as well.

R: Thank you so much for your time.

D: Thanks, Rich, no problem at all. Good speaking with you.

(See previous Project Of The Month winners)

The Project Of The Month is selected from the projects that grew the fastest in the previous month, based on the activity of the project community, on mailing lists and ticket trackers, and the commit and release activity of the project. In coming months (starting with February) we’re going to involve you, the SourceForge community, more in this process, by having a Twitter based vote on the POTM for February. Details coming soon.

HyperSQL DB is a database engine written in Java that can be embedded in Java applications, or it can be run as a standalone and connected to over JDBC. It also contains some tools for making JDBC connections to other databases.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

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Rich: Today I’m speaking with Fred Toussi and Blaine Simpson. Hello?

Blaine: Hi Rich.

Fred: Hello Rich.

R: So, without further introduction, here’s my conversation with the two lead developers of this project.

Well, let’s jump right in with the first question. How long have you been doing this project?

F: Eleven years.

R: And have the two of you been involved that whole time?

F: I’ve been involved since the beginning. Blaine joined after about a year.

B: Long timers.

R: How big is the overall developer community that you see patches and commits from?

F: At the moment there are three of us. In the past, there have been others. People join in, do some work, finish that work …

R: How does this database compare to other databases that people might be more familiary with, like PostgreSQL?

F: In general, the two differences: Our database can use memory very well …

R: So it’s really fast …

F: It can run completely in memory without any files.

B: And on portable devices too.

F: Exactly. Another aspect - our database compares very well with those well-known ones for small and medium-sized data, in terms of speed and so on. Now, the definition of small and medium is just going up as hardware gets faster, and more disk space, etc. So at the moment, several hundred megabytes I would say, it’s extremely fast, and compares extremely well to Postgres and MySQL.

B: And there are huge advantages to all of the java databases to integrate with Java applications. Not just HyperSQL, but JavaDB and Derby - those are a lot more efficient, and easier to integrate with Java applications.

R: So you sort of embed this in with your Java application? Is that how this works?

B: You can, and it’s very easy to either embed it in an application, or use a JDBC driver. All the popular databases have a JDBC driver. Even if it’s a completely C database, if it’s a popular database, it probably has a JDBC driver. It’s just a tiny jar file. So it’s very easy for any user, either a developer or someone just running a client, like running a spreadsheet, for them to get the JDBC driver. So we have a JDBC driver. They just get a jar, and they can use it with their Java app.

R: If somebody was looking to get involved in your project, what sort of openings do you have for someone has the right skill set.

F: Every area is open to development. More compatibility with other databases - commercial databases, so that people can port applications more easily. There are lots and lots of possibilities. But it takes a lot of knowledge of databases and SQL to participate in some of the areas of the database. But if there are some other areas where they probably need knowledge of some particular API. And a good knowldge of Java, of course. But there are openings and in the past we have had a few other core developers who have contributed to the project.

R: If there’s something you’re particularly passionate about on this project, what would that be?

F: Quality. Resilliance. Basically quality explains it all. Resilliance means it’s on 24/7. Nothing goes down, and it’s reliable.

B: Fred’s a tireless worker. If you look through the forum history, we’re on top of every problem. And as Fred says, he works very hard to keep everything reliable. He works on this full time, constantly. It’s a very solid product. We put a lot of effort in to make it very standalone. Most Java products that people want to integrate or embed a database into their product - it’s a lot of work, and a hassle dealing with all the interdependencies with other products. For example, if you just want to use a database for your Java product, so you pull down the jar for that database, usually you have to deal with all these interdependencies. It depends on these 12 libraries. They depend on another 100 libraries. And you have to … it’s a constant chore to make sure you’re at the right version. You don’t have that issue with hsqldb. It’s a single stand-alone jar. We don’t depend on anything else.

It means that some things are extra work. For example, for a tool, I have to generate some HTML. We have to do that from scratch, because we don’t want to depend on anything else. We don’t want to make that an extra chore for people who use the product.

F: I suggest Blaine describe the tool he’s working on, because it is a significant tool in its own right. It can be used with all other databases. So, Blaine, could you go ahead and describe that.

B: My main area of concentration with HyperSQL is the tool SQLTool, and it’s a generic JDBC client. JDBC is just accessing SQL databases over the Java protocol, JDBC. This tool can connect to any database that has a JDBC driver. Like I said a few minutes ago, all popular databases have a JDBC driver, so you can use this tool, SQLTool, to connect to and work with pretty much any relational database. It’s a command-line tool, so that means that if you’re looking for something graphical with buttons and pictures and graphical tables, this isn’t what you want. It’s for people who want to interactively work on the command line - type in SQL. And also for automation.

In that respect there are other tools that do the same thing like Derby’s IQL and Oracle’s SQL plus. It started as comparable to those tools, but it’s a lot more powerful for two reasons.

For one, those tools can’t work with just any JDBC database. They work with the database that they come with. SQLTool can work with any. You can write scripts and you can use the tool, the same exact commands, to work with any database.

The second advantage is that a lot of work has gone in to make it very stable and suitable for automation purposes. You can go to the command line, whether you’re on MacOS or Windows, or Unix, and right on the command line you can give a single command line with SQL in it. You don’t need to enter the program. You just give it on the command line. People who work with automation and scripting can recognize right away that that’s extremely useful.

A lot of work has gone in so that it gives a meaningful error status. It always ensures that it will return a success status if everything works. The developer has the control to use the default, which is if an error occurs just exit right away, depending on whether it’s interactive or not. But the error handling is intuitive. If you run it interactively and an error occurs, it tells you on the screen but it won’t exit. If you execute an SQL script with it, it will exit by default, and you’ll get an exit status. So it’s very easy to integrate that, put it in scripts or cron jobs, or autosys, or Windows scheduling systems, and send error notification through email or logging systems. Very suitable for automation tasks.

R: This sounds like it’s almost a full-time job. How much time do you all put into this project?

F: I’m working full time. Blaine has worked full time when he’s between assignments. He works part-time. There’s a lot of work that he has to do, to do with maintaining the code repository - version control - to do with releases - he has set up releases on Maven, on Sourceforge, etc, and with the documentation, with basic generation of documentation, because we use Docbook markup. There is a lot of logistics involved in releasing the new versions of the product, and Blaine has taken care of that as well as doing his SQLTools, and in the past he has also contributed code to the engine.

R: So you have commercial clients.

F: Yes, we have.

B: My time investment has been very sporadic, so even though I have been working steadily at regular daytime jobs, there have been several weeks when I have worked 40 hours on Hsqldb. I just finished up one of those marathon runs about a week ago, so there were about three weeks there where I would get back from my day job every day and crunch at hsqldb.

R: I’m curious about something here - this is more of a philosophy question. You have a full-time job here, and you have commercial clients. What is the rationale for making this Open Source as well?

F: Because it was Open Source to start with. The commercial clients like the fact that it’s Open Source. These people contribute financially to the project to keep it going, so they want it to be as it is.

I do also have another product which is not Open Source, but it’s only used by a small percentage of the commercial users. Most of them want the Open Source product, which is good enough for their use.

B: And for the SQLTool portion, that gets a lot more use because it is Open Source. Millions of people can benefit by connecting to commercial like Oracle, and Open Source databases like MySQL, and everything in between. I put a lot of work into the product, so I get a lot satisfaction from reaching a wider audience, being Open Source.

F: We’ve been in computing a long time - all three of us. I developed one of the early WYSISYG word processors in the late 80s and early 90s. And then the platform it was on disappeared. I thought that the next time I did something, it would be completely cross-platform, and Open, and it has a very long shelf-life. That was probably the main motivation.

B: We appreciate the social mechanisms - the forums and mailing lists - on Sourceforge, because for all these years it’s been nice to have that system in the background there working for us. I’ve spent minutes, adding up all the time, administering those communcations systems over the years. It’s nice to have that working so that I can concentrate on the code, and when people bring up problems, I can work on those problems and your communication and help systems take care of themselves.

F: We use the Sourceforge platform for bugs and for communication - the forums. We’ve used them from the beginning, and they are adequate for our needs.

R: Thank you all so much for your time. I really appreciate it.

F: You’re welcome.

B: Thanks very much Rich.

You can subscribe to this, and future podcasts, in iTunes or elsewhere, at http://feeds.feedburner.com/sourceforge/podcasts, and it’s also listed in the iTunes store.

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Rich: I’m speaking with Ola Sandström, and we’re going to talk about the Mardao project.

Could you tell us what this project is, how it works, how it fits together, and how people use this in the real world.

Ola: Mardao is a tool that helps the database developer get the data out of the database into the application or the website, depending on what the app is. Mardao generates the data access objects, so that the developer doesn’t have to worry much about SQL statements, or relations, and so on. And it also saves the developer a lot of time and effort writing boilerplate code.

R: How did you get started with this project? What kind of a problem were you trying to solve?

O: In the first place, we wanted something more effective than similar techniques such as Hibernate. I also had a colleague who had generated similar stuff, but taking a different approach. It was for a specific project that I created the more general tool.

R: Do you have a feel for how large your user community is?

O: I know how many downloads there have been, and I see how many downloads there are when we make each release. That varies between 50 and 100 downloads. Maybe the recurring usage is about ten or fifteen users. Hopefully the number of production systems is about the same.

It’s not a big community, but it is my first Open Source project, so I’m ok with that.

R: The developer community is just you? You’re the only person who works on this? Is that correct?

O: No, there is one more developer - a former colleague - who has focused on one of the implementing techniques. You can use Mardao either for Spring, or you can use in on top of JPA, or on Google App Engine. This former colleague of mine implemented the JPA port.

R: What do you have planned for future versions of the project?

O: The biggest thing right now is to support Android applications. There is a nice SQL Light database on each Android device. It’s a very good fit to generate code for those databases. I think we’ll have a next versions early next year.

I’ve been quite happy hosting at Sourceforge, because I think you get the necessary tools, such as the Wiki and the issue tracker and so on. I certainly would consider starting another project there.

R: If someone wanted to get involved in an Open Source project, and they have some Java skills and database skills, what sort of an opening might there be on your project for such a developer? Is there a need that you have that you might welcome another developer for?

O: They certainly would be very welcome to join and commit. I think that if the user base grows a little bit - if I get more feedback, there would certainly be more areas where we would need to improve and so on. I’m not sure right now what the next big thing to focus on, but I’m sure any developer would come up with ideas if they start using it.

R: Thank you very much.

O: Thank you. Bye.