Open-source Rookies of the Year put in the spotlight

In keeping with industry trends, such as the ones predicted by Scott Plewes, Black Duck has named open-source projects connected with social-media, gaming and cloud platform-as-a-service projects to its fourth annual Open Source Rookies of the Year list.

The 10 projects on the rookies list, which only considers projects started last year, were selected using data from Ohloh.net and the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. The projects were awarded points based commit activity, size and the number of inbound links to the project.

The projects are Boostrap, BrowserID, Canvas, CloudFoundry, Moai, Mooege, OpenShift, Orion, rstat.us and Salt.

Peter Vescuso, Black Duck’s executive vice president of marketing and business development, said that biggest trend this year is that GitHub is the leading hosting service for these projects, with 28 of the projects in the top 50 rookies list—and nine of the top 10—on the site. In 2010, just four of the top 10 projects and 16 of the top 50 were on GitHub, according to Black Duck.

The three most popular languages used by the top 50 are JavaScript (28%), Java (14%) and Ruby (12%). While only new projects are selected for the list each year, a portion of OpenStack projects also appeared on the list last year.

“This list is reflective of the level of innovation going on in the open-source world. Anyone can participate in any of the projects listed,” Vescuso said.

Additionally, he added that it is interesting to see that, for the past four years, projects from the Apache Software Foundation and the Mozilla Project have made it to the top 10 list, which means those communities continue to grow and succeed.

If you’re curious about the newest and almost-newest projects to be recognized as top rookies by Black Duck, SD Times presents you with a comprehensive look at the past three years’ winners—including 2011’s—over the next few pages.

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1. Bootstrap: A toolkit from Twitter designed to kick-start development of Web applications and sites. It includes base CSS and HTML for typography, forms, buttons, tables, grids, navigation, and more.
2. BrowserID: A part of Mozilla’s exploration into an identity system that puts users in control, independent of any particular service provider. BrowserID is a secure, decentralized, open-source, cross-browser way to sign onto websites using your e-mail address. With BrowserID, users select from their various e-mail addresses, giving them a consistent experience across all of their personas. BrowserID helps users keep their online experience secure and private through the browser by limiting the flow of information to what is strictly necessary to let users log in.
3. Canvas: The only commercial open-source learning management system and the only LMS native to the cloud. The Canvas LMS source code is primarily developed at Instructure, but is supported by a global community of developers that share Instructure’s vision. Canvas leverages other modern technologies like HTML5, jQuery, OAuth, and numerous external service integrations. All of these solutions, through Canvas, help educators and learners collaborate more effectively.
4. Cloud Foundry: An open platform-as-a-service providing a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services. Initiated by VMware with broad industry support, Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy and scale applications. It is an open source project and is available through a variety of private cloud distributions and public cloud instances.
5. Moai: Billed as the mobile platform for pro game developers, it differentiates itself through its cloud-based game services and rapid development of Android, Chrome and iOS titles, all built in the industry-standard Lua scripting language. Moai developers appreciate the ability to write both client- and server-side game logic without context switching or cross-team projects, as well as the open-source nature of the Moai SDK that ensures they can build titles without compromises. Previously announced companies using Moai include Bungie, HareBrained Schemes, DistinctDev, Go Go Kiddo and Nay Games.
6. Mooege: An open-source and freely available educational game server emulator written in C#.
7. OpenShift: Red Hat’s free, auto-scaling platform-as-a-service built on open-source technologies that enable developers to quickly deploy applications to the cloud. OpenShift supports many popular languages, frameworks and middleware components.
8. Orion: A browser-based open-source tool integration platform built by the Eclipse platform team and focused on moving software development to the Web as a Web experience. Orion addresses the core coding activities (code editing, project navigation, search, and working with source-control systems), and provides extensibility mechanisms to allow application-level linking with other Web-based tools.
9. rstat.us: Allows end users to share their thoughts from micro-blogging using Twitter accounts.
10. Salt: An open-source configuration management and remote execution application, Salt is written with the intent of making central system management and configuration as simple, yet as flexible as possible. Salt is the core application of the saltstack project.

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1. Diaspora: A privacy-sensitive, personally controlled, do-it-all open-source social network.
2. OpenStack: An open-source, open-standards cloud-computing platform, backed by NASA and Rackspace, for building reliable cloud infrastructure.
3. Cloud9IDE: An Integrated Development Environment built on top of Node.js, it aims to bring the best features from other existing IDEs and source-code editors such as Eclipse, NetBeans, TextMate, bundled as plugins.
4. OpenStack Nova: A cloud-computing fabric controller (the main part of an IaaS system), it is written in Python, uses the Eventlet and Twisted frameworks, and relies on the standard AMQP messaging protocol.
5. NuGet: A free, open-source, developer-focused package management system for the .NET platform, designed to simplify the process of incorporating third-party libraries into a .NET application during development.
6. Activiti BPM Platform: A business process management and workflow system targeted at businesspeople, developers and system admins. Its core is a super-fast BPMN2 process engine for Java. Activiti runs in any Java application, on a server, on a cluster, or in the cloud.
7. SparkleShare: A file-sharing and collaboration tool, it is designed to make sharing documents and collaboration easier, and to share information among project collaborators. It allows you to instantly sync with any Git repository to which you have access.
8. VoltDB: A fast, scalable, open-source OLTP SQL database with ACID. It is an alternative to NoSQL key-value stores and database sharing.
9. RapidFTR: A mobile application that lets aid workers collect, sort and share information about children in emergency situations. RapidFTR allows for the quick input of essential data about a child on a mobile phone, including a photograph, age, family information, health status and location information. Data is saved automatically and uploaded to a central database whenever network access becomes available. Registered aid workers will be able to create and modify entries for children in their care as well as search all existing records in order to help distressed parents find information about their missing children.
10. ownCloud: An open personal cloud that runs on personal servers. It enables access of data from many kinds of devices, and it allows sharing with other people. It supports automatic backups, versioning and encryption.

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1. Live Android: For those who want to try Android without buying a phone, Live Android lets the user run Android on his or her PC without affecting other files.
2. Open Health Natural Language Processing: Developed by IBM and the Mayo Clinic, the project gives medical clinicians and researchers access to unstructured textual documents (e.g., pathology reports, clinical notes, etc.).
3. Mobile Browser Definition File: A provider of information needed to adaptively render content for mobile phones and devices, which presents server applications with a set of 67 capabilities or properties (from screen size to cookie support) to describe a mobile client device.
4. Redis (REmote Dictionary Server): An advanced key-store database that support fast, persistent access to a data set. It is a simple way of storing data, and is a concept that can scale to the cloud.
5. Smasher: An audio loop slicer designed to create striking effects from WAV, MP3, FLAC or AIFF files in seconds, without a sequencer. Effects include filter sweeps, phasing, flanging, delay and distortion.
6. abiCloud: Infrastructure software for the creation and integral management of public and private clouds based on heterogeneous environments. The project aims to offer users a tool with the capacity for scaling, management, automatic and immediate provision of servers, storage, networks, and virtual network devices, as well as applications.
7. Transdroid: A remote torrent client for Android that supports faster downloads of large video, audio or program files.
8. Rainmeter: This customizable PC resource meter can display various performance data in different formats. Rainmeter can measure CPU load, allocated memory, network traffic, performance data, uptime, free disk space, and more.
9. TweetCraft: This World of Warcraft add-on enables players to send and receive tweets using Twitter without leaving the game; automatically upload and post screenshots using TwitPic; and automatically tweet certain in-game events such as achievements.
10. Native Client: Runs x86 native code in Web applications, with the goal of ensuring browser neutrality, OS portability and safety.