OStatic

The developers of Django, a Python-based framework for creating and deploying sophisticated Web applications, announced yesterday that they have established the Django Foundation. This foundation, like foundations for Apache and Mozilla, will allow for communal ownership of the Django code, as well as accept donations and pay individuals.

Open-source fans will be delighted to read a new survey published by O'Reilly Media, and announced at their annual Open Source Conference (OSCon), taking place this week in Portland, Oregon. Their report, called Open Source in the Enterprise, details the ways in which open source is being adopted by large organizations. The report indicates that overall usage of open source is growing, pointing to download statistics from Sourceforge along with usage trends inside of companies.

Apache fans in the Ruby community were delighted several months ago, when Phusion released Passenger, an Apache module for deploying Rails applications. I have been working with Passenger over the last few weeks, and am pleased to report that the module is extremely easy to install, use, and configure. Passenger has succeeded in bringing me back into the world of Apache after several years of wandering in the HTTP server desert.

Microsoft announced on Friday that it would be joining the Apache Software Foundation, one of the leading organizations in the open-source world. Microsoft became a platinum sponsor of the ASF, which costs $100,000/year and is the highest level of sponsorship that the foundation offers. In a blog posting announcing the sponsorship, Sam Ramji, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy and head of its open source software lab, indicated that this demonstrates Microsoft's interest in working along with Apache on many projects. At the same time, he wrote that this does not mean Microsoft is turning its back on proprietary software, including its IIS Web server.

If you want to search for a piece of text on the Web, you probably turn to Google or a similar search engine. But how can you integrate search into your Web site?

Lucene is a high-quality Apache-sponsored engine for indexing and searching documents. While that would be enough for most people, a host of add-ons and complementary open source products make Lucene an even better choice when looking for a search engine.

The Apache Sofware Foundation's 2008 conference in Europe is taking place this week, with formal sessions starting today. In the coming days, I'll describe several ASF-sponsored projects that are interesting and useful, which offer useful functionality and a general promise of quality.

What does the ASF do, and what sorts of programs are discussed at the conference?