SourceForge.net, a longtime provider of open source code and applications, has announced a new service for developers that provides virtualized access to open source apps. With the new Hosted Apps service, you’re able to install an app within your own web space, and it’s managed by the SourceForge team in a dedicated and secure web space, including any necessary maintenance like updates and patches.
The New Hosted Apps Service
At this time, there are only three applications available in the new hosted format:
- LimeSurvey
- MediaWiki
- phpBB
However, any existing application can now be enabled as a hosted app, too. This can be done from the new “Hosted Apps” Project Admin page, a link to which can be found under the “Admin” project navigation menu.
According to Ross Turk, director of community at SourceForge, “developers can be much more productive when they don’t have to worry about maintaining their infrastructure, and this new offering allows them to use the tools they know and like without the burden of maintaining them.”
Benefits Of Hosted Apps
This service was actually launched quietly a few weeks ago, as SourceForge insiders may already know. The announcement was then made via a forum posting which clued in members to the new service. But since the news only hit the mainstream channels today, we imagine this means that they’re now ready for primetime.
That earlier announcement touted several benefits to using Hosted Apps, including the following:
- Eliminates the overhead of deploying supported applications; simply opt-in and begin using the application right away. No need to deal with config files and install procedures.
- Served from a dedicated database and web server pool, separate from the project web servers — so you don’t need to cope with the security limitations of project web’s shared hosting environment, or project web’s outbound mail and connectivity restrictions.
- They maintain the application code for Hosted Apps and will deploy updates as they become available from the vendor. This should reduce the risk from vulnerabilities found in the Hosted Apps and eliminate a major administrative burden (installing updates) to projects.
- They perform regular backups of the Hosted Apps data, but also provide you the ability to easily make application backups on-demand.
- They perform application testing, tuning and monitoring to ensure Hosted Apps operate properly. If service faults occur, they respond and fix the issues. If defects are found in the application (either through our own testing or through end-user report), they will repair the defects or raise the defect to the vendor for repair.
- All Hosted Apps make use of our centralized authentication infrastructure (users login with their SourceForge.net usernames and passwords) but retain the permissions (authorization) of the application (so, for example, existing users of MediaWiki will find permissions handling exactly as they expect).
- Since this offering is centrally managed, any improvements they make either to the infrastructure or to the Hosted Apps themselves will immediately become available to all projects. The Hosted Apps offering reduces their overhead for adding major new functionality to their offering, since all applications share common integration points and common infrastructure.
- Since Hosted Apps are available under an Open Source license, this centralized service has the potential to rapidly increase the user base of Open Source applications and drive high quality feedback for the further improvement of those applications.
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The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.
Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on servers. Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the distribution’s visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its viability in large-scale deployments.
Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is primarily funded by donations, the organization’s technical requirements are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.
Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.
In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into some of Wikimedia’s technical challenges and discussed the benefit of migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.
He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200 servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has simplified administration considerably for the organization. “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing,” Vibber told Computerworld. “Everything is a million times easier.”
Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in 2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced Landscape, a server management tool.
Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.
Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution’s growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn’t appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large-scale free deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for support contracts.
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Intel Corp. is unveiling new technology that will let computers wake up from their power-saving sleep state when they receive a phone call over the Internet.
Current computers have to be fully on to receive a call, making them impractical and energy-wasters as replacements for the telephone.
The new component Intel is announcing Thursday will let computers automatically return to a normal, full-powered state when a call comes in. The computer can activate its microphone and loudspeaker to alert the user, then connect the call.
“This certainly helps the PC become a much better center of communications in the home,” said Trevor Healy, chief executive of Jajah, which will be the first Internet telephone company to utilize the feature.
The first Intel motherboards with the Remote Wake capability will be shipping in the next month, said Joe Van De Water, director of consumer product marketing for Intel.
These components, which are at the heart of every computer, will most likely be used by smaller computer manufacturers. Bigger names like Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. use their own motherboard solutions, but Intel is working to supply them with the technology as well.
The four initial Remote Wake motherboards will be for desktop computers and will need an Internet connection via Ethernet cable, as Wi-Fi doesn’t work in sleep mode.
Van De Water said the computer will know to wake up only for calls from services to which the user has subscribed, so computer-waking prank calls should be impossible.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Jajah is setting itself up as a link between Web companies and the phone system. In April, it signed a deal to become the phone service provider for Yahoo Inc.’s Messenger. Jajah intends to offer the ability to wake up computers to other instant-messaging and Internet voice services, like Google Inc.’s Talk and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Live Messenger, Healy said. It will be able to wake up subscriber computers both for calls dialed with a number and for those that are directed at a user name.
A fully on desktop PC usually consumes more than 60 watts of power, with many models ranging into the hundreds of watts. In the so-called S3 sleep state, they consume around 10 watts.
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