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Wiki's work, but I am thinking more along the lines of Lucene where you can point it at existing data without much effort. Assuming config changes, cert and license data and network diagrams have usable text already associated with them, you can save a great deal of time just indexing what you have.

We repeat the same lessons every generation, don't we?

We have our own terrible business languages, our own non-relational databases*, our own stupid development fads, our own overwrought RPC protocol, our own profoundly ignorant ways to "disable" things for the user, our own wasteful incompatibilities, our own locked-down propretiary platforms, and the same casual disregard for proper security.

This industry has no sense of its own history. Instead of benefiting from the innumerable hours past programmers spent solving universal problems, we ignore and reject their work, and with only a few exceptions, we spend countless hours solving solved problems.

By the time we work through the mess, another generation of programmers will have rejected our work, and will be well on the way to repeating the cycle. It's depressing as hell.

(Come to think of it, I don't think I've ever written a post that offended so many software developers simultaneously.)

* RDBMs systems didn't come first; people started using them over navigational databases for good reasons that still apply today.

You mean this MIT license? The one which says "do whatever you like, just don't sue and provide this notice"? The old Apache license is similar, and 2.0 even includes patent provisions.

Looks like the FUD already worked on you. Not all licenses are the same, nor are all OSS licenses viral.

You mean this MIT license? The one which says "do whatever you like, just don't sue and provide this notice"? The old Apache license is similar, and 2.0 even includes patent provisions.

Looks like the FUD already worked on you. Not all licenses are the same, nor are all OSS licenses viral.

It's 0.20 but it's stable and production ready already. I use it with HBase and it scales awesomely.

Read it. Even just the headings:

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

There is no patent risk (well, no more than any other Apache 2.0 licensed software) involved in this particular instance.

So... the linked article says the Kumo search team (the ones who develop the FS) USE open source. But I can nowhere see that the FS is released as open source. A citation would be good, especially since the used license would be quit important.

You should check your glasses and re-RTFA. Two points there:

1) The Kumo search team did not develop the FS. They've used the one Apache Hadoop (guess the license).

2) The Kumo search team have implemented a BigTable analog on top of Hadoop FS, and that's what they've open sourced. The result is a subproject of Hadoop now (again, guess the license).

Also, this isn't obvious from TFA itself, but looking at the sources that it references, this is really old news: the blog post they link to is from 2007. It is also before Powerset was bought by Microsoft (that happened in 2008), so the relevance of all this to Microsoft policies is unclear.

So... the linked article says the Kumo search team (the ones who develop the FS) USE open source. But I can nowhere see that the FS is released as open source. A citation would be good, especially since the used license would be quit important.

You should check your glasses and re-RTFA. Two points there:

1) The Kumo search team did not develop the FS. They've used the one Apache Hadoop (guess the license).

2) The Kumo search team have implemented a BigTable analog on top of Hadoop FS, and that's what they've open sourced. The result is a subproject of Hadoop now (again, guess the license).

Also, this isn't obvious from TFA itself, but looking at the sources that it references, this is really old news: the blog post they link to is from 2007. It is also before Powerset was bought by Microsoft (that happened in 2008), so the relevance of all this to Microsoft policies is unclear.

The product is called Hbase/ Apache license, so it is open source.

"... the available Hadoop technology, Powerset decided to give back to the community by developing an open-source analog to BigTable that is built on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)."
Since Hadoop is Apache License 2.0, presumably this extension is so too.

It is called HBase according to the cited release post.

Wiki:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase
Yahoo and Adobe seem to run it too (see PoweredBy).

Project website:
http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/

Looking inside the last release tarball, it really is Apache License Version 2.0.

"... the available Hadoop technology, Powerset decided to give back to the community by developing an open-source analog to BigTable that is built on top of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)."
Since Hadoop is Apache License 2.0, presumably this extension is so too.

It is called HBase according to the cited release post.

Wiki:
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/Hbase
Yahoo and Adobe seem to run it too (see PoweredBy).

Project website:
http://hadoop.apache.org/hbase/

Looking inside the last release tarball, it really is Apache License Version 2.0.

Matt Aimonetti is a Ruby on Rails bozo:

http://merbist.com/about/

He doesn't seem to be particularly involved with CouchDB:

http://couchdb.apache.org/community/committers.html

I guess he was presenting information about CouchDB to the ruby community.

None of the articles say it, but they are probably talking about HBase. If this is the case, this is seriously old news.

HBase was started by the Powerset guys before being acquired by Microsoft. After the acquisition there was a lot of concern in the Hadoop community about whether the Powerset guys would be allowed to continue to contribute. They have, and as far as I can tell, the community is not particularly concerned about MS's involvement.

You're thinking about this the wrong way. Forget running Windows apps, why not have killer apps that are native to Linux and people would switch just to run, other stuff be damned.

It's been done before, (why else do you think linux servers are so popular?) but it's about time the Linux desktop had its own killer app.

Server side include are Microsoft BS? Pffffft.

Apache Server Side Includes
Coldfusion server side includes
PHP Server Side Includes

I could go on and on, but you'd just waste my "internets" if I had to read it. Also, MVC "Web 2.0 toolkit exclusive"? Have another punch in the face:

Model-View-Controller at Wikipedia

Interestingly, it would be easier to store all my data in Freenet and have all my PCs form a darknet with each other.

I guess it would be cool to have a darkLAN, but with Freenet, you have to duplicate your data.

It may make more sense to use GlusterFS or Hadoop for your LAN.

If you want to add crypto, you could store the above data volumes on plain ol EXT(3|4) filesystems inside a TrueCrypt partition.

The Free Software Foundation considers the Apache License, Version 2.0 to be a free software license, compatible with version 3 of the GPL.

Again, with all due respect load balancing is something that the Apache crowd figured out a long time ago. My particular setup might not be ripe for the big leagues, but reproduced on an industrial scale Apache is quite capable. I also wasn't "bragging", I was simply sharing my personal experience with this sort of thing. I often appreciate it when other slashdotters do the same.

If you'd like more info on Apache HA, I'd start here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html

You also might want to look at this discussion; its not directly related but has some good commentary:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/06/26/2026217

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-difference-between-http-and-https.htm

In many ways, https is identical to http, because it follows the same basic protocols. The http or https client, such as a Web browser, establishes a connection to a server on a standard port. When a server receives a request, it returns a status and a message, which may contain the requested information or indicate an error if part of the process malfunctioned. Both systems use the same Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme, so that resources can be universally identified. Use of https in a URI scheme rather than http indicates that an encrypted connection is desired.

There are some primary differences between http and https, however, beginning with the default port, which is 80 for http and 443 for https. Https works by transmitting normal http interactions through an encrypted system, so that in theory, the information cannot be accessed by any party other than the client and end server. There are two common types of encryption layers: Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), both of which encode the data records being exchanged.

When using an https connection, the server responds to the initial connection by offering a list of encryption methods it supports. In response, the client selects a connection method, and the client and server exchange certificates to authenticate their identities. After this is done, both parties exchange the encrypted information after ensuring that both are using the same key, and the connection is closed. In order to host https connections, a server must have a public key certificate, which embeds key information with a verification of the key owner's identity. Most certificates are verified by a third party so that clients are assured that the key is secure.

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/ssl-howto.html

The first time a user attempts to access a secured page on your site, he or she is typically presented with a dialog containing the details of the certificate (such as the company and contact name), and asked if he or she wishes to accept the Certificate as valid and continue with the transaction. Some browsers will provide an option for permanently accepting a given Certificate as valid, in which case the user will not be bothered with a prompt each time they visit your site. Other browsers do not provide this option. Once approved by the user, a Certificate will be considered valid for at least the entire browser session.

Also, while the SSL protocol was designed to be as efficient as securely possible, encryption/decryption is a computationally expensive process from a performance standpoint. It is not strictly necessary to run an entire web application over SSL, and indeed a developer can pick and choose which pages require a secure connection and which do not. For a reasonably busy site, it is customary to only run certain pages under SSL, namely those pages where sensitive information could possibly be exchanged. This would include things like login pages, personal information pages, and shopping cart checkouts, where credit card information could possibly be transmitted. Any page within an application can be requested over a secure socket by simply prefixing the address with https: instead of http:. Any pages which absolutely require a secure connection should check the protocol type associated with the page request and take the appropriate action if https is not specified.

Finally, using name-based virtual hosts on a secured connection can be problematic. This is a design limitation of the SSL protocol itself. The SSL handshake, where the client browser accepts the server certificate, must occur before the HTTP request is accessed. As a result

Just use mod_proxy_balancer (included in Apache) either to load-balance sessions between the two servers using session tracking, or to to use a server as a backup with the parameter "status=+H" (only available for the latests Apache versions).
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.3/mod/mod_proxy_balancer.html

Technically, Google's Android is a code derivative of DavlicVM and Apache Harmony. Apache Harmony and DavlicVM can be considered as similar to Java. However, Android is Not a subset of Java.

Some links to articles discussing the topic:
http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/2683

Some information on DavlicVM and Apache Harmony:
http://www.dalvikvm.com/
http://harmony.apache.org/

Each VM/platform has its strengths and purpose. There should be room in the IT industry for Java, Apache Harmony, Google App Engine, .NET, Mono, LLVM, Tamarin, Parrot, and many other VM's with their associated programming languages.
Hope you find this information helpful.

There's also Cassandra, the Java based distributed database that they've made open-source - first on google code, and now as an apache project(in incubation).

Like, there's only one Linux kernel, only one C compiler, only one bash shell.. only one Perl, only one Java...

You are correct that there are only one Linux kernel, but there are other free UNIX kernels you could use instead. When it comes to compilers both LLVM and GCC are widely used. (LLVM is used in Gallum3D, the new acceleration architecture for X, and in Shark, a CPU agnostic JIT for OpenJDK. A C frontend not based on GCC is in development) There are many shells. Ubuntu, a quite popular Linux distro, actually uses dash as default /bin/sh. While it's true that only OpenJDK (if I recall correctly) passes the TCK for Java you also have competing implementations like Harmony, what Google uses on Android. You have more competition on the parts of the Java stack that takes less time to implement.

ever tried http://lucene.apache.org/?
it's as good as it gets!

i've seen this. no constraints on the data that is orginally put in, not enough referential integrity and you get customers opening up a lot of trouble tickets and you end up hiring people to clean up the data every time a mistake is found

Really not trying to troll here, but this isn't too far from what a lot of people are dealing with when they use MySQL, especially the MyISAM engine.

A lot of people are using MySQL so it's just another step in the same direction.

In some projects, RDBM's aren't necessary. Look at what Google's been able to do with Bigtable/MapReduce. The open source equivalent seems to be Apache's HBase in the Hadoop project.

Hey, HTTP has this neat header named "Accept-Encoding." Some valid values in this header are "gzip" and "compress".

Perhaps you see where I'm going with this...?

(In case you didn't, see the documentation for Apache's mod_deflate.)

Really?

Huh? You're pretty harsh.

AOL and the MSN part of MS were certainly rivals. The icons plastered all over the desktop were put there by the hardware vendor. I know they paid quite a few different parties to put their icons on the desktop with the software install. AOL bought Netscape primarily to keep MS honest on the browser front, IMHO. Needless to say, they cooperated when it was in the best interest of both parties.

In the "GPL or even Apache" quote, it will be obvious to most /. readers that the latter refers to the Apache Software Foundation's License.

I've set up Apache and mod_proxy_balancer for just this purpose. The sites don't have enough traffic for me to justify buying an F5 or Cisco CSS load balancer, so I use proxy balancer with a bunch of vhosts, it works great.

Add Keepalived and you can have redundant (though not stateful failover) load balancers on the super cheap.

For SSL it still works well. Give it a look, took all of an afternoon to set up a failover pair of servers. I don't know yet how much traffic it will take, but a single CPU 800Mhz server is doing a couple Mb/sec with no sweat for me.

Facebook was grown organically in several different languages, so theirs may be a good example to learn from. To create an easily extensible website, they needed a uniform way of connecting everything together. They created Thrift to cope with this problem, and have released it as open source. From the web page, it supports "C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk, and OCaml."

This, I think, is the reason why OSS is generally of poor quality (generally speaking) compared to closed source competition.

While you're trolling, here's some fodder:

• Commercial version of faxing system that is more reliable than Hylafax please?
• Commercial web server that's more reliable than Apache please?
• Commercial E-mail software more reliable than Thunderbird or even Mutt?
• Commercial software that can compete with Python or PERL in their markets?

Yeah, NASA standardized on Python because it sucks, that must be it.

There's a lot more FOSS out there than you may be aware of, and its a lot higher quality than you're giving it credit for. Kraptasticapp123 doesn't count; I can find a million of those on 'commercial' shareware CDs.

Will they force Google to allow other browsers to be shipped with android?

Any individual or company can already do this. See: Apache License, Version 2.0

Here's another one:

OFBiz (previously known as Open For Business)

.htaccess works absolutely fine on shared hosts. You need to look more closely at .htaccess implementations. Your directives apply only to a given docroot, directory, or even file.

That's why .htaccess is a file you place in any directory you want to control.

Seth

What's the next big DB?

CouchDB.

with its RESTful interface, its map/reduce functionality, its ability to scale huge, and its simplicity of replication, i'd have to say CouchDB in a heartbeat. especially as data gets bigger, and data warehousing becomes more important.

of course, this also means moving more of the software and business logic into the database, and that's the opposite direction of mySQL.

No. It's a search engine for your website. It's not quite as simple as a SELECT query. Lucene is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine library written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.. That does quite a bit more than a SELECT query could hope to do.

Apache: http://www.apache.org/ ( the link is there just in case ...). Licencing is important but is not the only factor. And for the Jakarta projects the fact that you can use some library in close source software without to worry is an excellent think.

I concede that the bylaws of the ASF state "To be eligible for membership, a person or entity must be nominated by a current member..." however as a matter of practice the current membership of the ASF consists solely of people, and to the best of my knowledge no company/organization has ever been a member (or even been nominated to be a member)

It doesn't change anything about my underlying point: Microsoft did not join the ASF, and it is not Microsofts first code contribution to an ASF project.

The request-time attributes + templating taglibs seen in JSP provide a much cleaner separation between logic and HTML.

Wait, are you serious? JSP is no better than classic ASP; it's arguably quite a bit worse than classic ASP since it isn't language agnostic. JSP is a defunct and outstandingly annoying technology to work with that encourages all sorts of bad habits.

You might consider checking out Tapestry 5 for something a little more this century.

*shrug* It works. The admin interface is a little wonky at times, but otherwise nice. Adding LDAP fields is a pain in a half, though. You have to modify the schema file directly and restart the directory server. Not exactly user-friendly.

Personally, I've been keeping my eye on Apache Directory Server. It's modern, it's Java-based, it's easy to setup, it's open source, and it's made by Apache. What more could you want? ;-)

I work on quite a bit of web apps that use the Domino (server-side) part, and I'm telling you, I wouldn't work with anything else.

Have you seen CouchDB?

The ease at which I can create a system using Domino leaves something like ASP (which I've worked with too) in the dust.

Have you seen Rails?

Just curious -- I haven't actually worked with Lotus.

CouchDB, which has been generating some hype lately (especially among Rails fans), is by Damien Katz, who did work on LotusNotes and Domino, and claims CouchDB is inspired by that.

According to him, Lotus got a lot of things wrong, but it got the database right.

I don't know if there would be anything to gain from the original (even just to read through it), or if we should all be focused on CouchDB now, but it would be interesting to find out.

Transacted files manipulation has been available in *userland* Java for years in commons-transaction project -> http://commons.apache.org/transaction/file/index.html

Yes, of course you can do transactions without FS support - all databases are doing it already, for another example. However, on FS level, you already have a mechanism that is needed - the FS journal. Adding a transaction level on top of that means adding another journal (and a lot of extra code).

Even then, few people use it, because transactions make sense mainly when they are both concurrent and serializable.

Actually, I'd argue that the most useful scenario is "snapshot" mode (even if it's read-only) - and transacted NTFS does that.

Of course, it all depends on the task at hand. But I've seen many cases where elaborate file locking schemes were devised to essentially do the same job a transaction manager would do much easier.

If I understand the grand-parent post and this space in general correctly, think things like BigTable at google or open-source implementations like Hypertable or HBase.

Why not use the Hadoop distributed file system? It offers automatic replication and you can treat each "store" as a "rack" to guarantee multiple remote backups.

You also get the immediate advantage of having a single file namespace and instant streaming access to all of the files from any single location.

The only advantage to Bittorrent that I can see is faster recovery time since a single store can source the backup from from N other stores (instead of 2, or whatever number of replications you have decided on).

That'll work fine unless they're using Name Based Virtual Hosts.

Regardless, as (almost) all of us know there's a number of ways to bypass this bloody stupid filter.

Disclaimer: I don't think Child Pornography should be legal. However, I very strongly disagree that the Government has the right to put in access-Level filtering, regardless of their case.
The ends DO NOT justify the means.

JSF, RichFaces, Hibernate, MySQL, developed on NetBeans and served by Apache TomCat on CentOS for a state government contract.

We have to train ourselves, but that's half the fun.

The other half will be when we pull the plug on one legacy Oracle database with a per CPU cycle license the state is paying an obscene amount of money for.

If you feel the urge to play with MapReduce (or reade the paper), you don't need a fancy Linux distro to do it. MapReduce is simply the map() and reduce() functions, exactly as implemented in Python. Granted, Google implementation can work with absurdly large data sets, but for small data sets, Python is all you need.

How do you know that his pdf was not generated using fop?

Why do you care so much ? From the Apache manual: "At this time no web browsers support RFC 2817."

That is the RFC for StartTLS which is something different. I'm talking about SNI which is already supported in Firefox 2, Opera 8, and IE 7. It is also in Apache 2.2.8 and OpenSSL 0.9.8f.