OStatic

Want to learn a new programming language or development framework? Books, magazines, and blogs are excellent -- but a growing number of people are also learning from screencasts, tutorials that combine someone's voice with a video of their computer screen. You can watch the teacher develop in real time, describing the actions that he or she is taking while they take place. There are many screencasts for open-source languages and frameworks, many for free and some for a nominal fee. Screencasts are playing a growing role in my attempt to keep up with new technologies, and you might well find them useful, too.

Prototype makes it easy for developers to work with HTML forms, asynchronous Ajax requests, and create and manipulate HTML elements. However, Prototype is a bare-bones library, providing none of the widgets or special effects that are included in many competing open-source JavaScript libraries, such as Dojo and YUI. It should not come as a surprise, then, to find that developers have stepped in to fill this void, creating a number of libraries that sit on top of Prototype and/or Script.aculo.us. There are several libraries that make it possible to draw graphs and charts within the browser window using JavaScript; this week, Deensoft announced the pending availability of their graphing library for Prototype, known as ProtoChart.

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.

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.

Successful open-source projects have strong communities. What can you do to ensure that the community around your project is as strong as possible? At least two talks at today's OSCon in Portland, Oregon, will address this issue. They will look at antipatterns, things that are known not to work when building a community. These talks come just a few months after the publication of Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody, in which he describes how society is changing as a result of the fact that the Internet massively reduces the cost of communication, publication, and distribution.

If you're a Web developer, it's a pretty good bet that one of your most important tools is Firebug, an open-source debugger for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Ajax that works inside of the open-source Firefox Web browser. Since it was first unveiled several years ago, Firebug has taken the Web-development world by storm, revolutionizing developers' ability to modify, test, and debug Web applications. In the last month, Firebug has received hosting and development assistance from Mozilla, a change that will almost certainly benefit both the software and the community.

For years, you could tell the hottest open-source projects by the number of programmers on an e-mail list, or by the number of books published. Increasingly, though, the hottest projects are those around whom service-oriented businesses are being formed. Yesterday, Ruby on Rails hosting company Engine Yard received a $15 million series B round from NEA, Amazon, and Benchmark. This follows an earlier $3.5 million round in January of this year.

Last week, Microsoft announced Equipt, a subscription service for Microsoft Office and related products. The product, which will cost $70/year and be sold at Circuit City stores, will provide the user with one year of updated anti-virus and spyware programs, Microsoft Office, and access to the Live workspace product for sharing documents. Equipt is not an open-source package. Rather, this is a way to keep the revenue coming from Microsoft Office. But Microsoft's new pricing strategy both vindicates and challenges business strategies employed by open-source companies.