|
|
AS OF 5/17/2008 12:19PM EST
|
Following Open-Source Trend
Hewlett-Packard, Rogue Wave make donations to Apache
By Jennifer deJong
August 15, 2005 —
There’s no stopping the momentum behind open-source code donations.
Following the industry leaders, Boulder, Colo.-based Rogue Wave Software last month announced that it has donated its cross-platform C++ Standard Library to the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Earlier, Hewlett-Packard said that three of its offerings had moved out of the foundation’s incubator, gaining status as official Apache projects.
Giving code to open-source initiatives is a fundamental change for the entire industry, noted Rogue Wave’s president, Cory Isaacson. “It’s a big thing, and we wanted to support it.” IBM led the open-source charge. The company backed the Eclipse framework and also contributed code to Apache as early as 1999, when it donated its XML Parser for Java. Since then, BEA, JBoss, Sun and a host of other companies have followed suit.
Rogue Wave made its donation not only to show support for open source, but also because C++ standard libraries, which provide basic algorithms, have become commodities, according to Isaacson. Companies that sell compilers include platform-specific versions of the library with their offerings. And Rogue Wave includes its C++ Standard Library, which works across multiple compilers, databases and operating systems, with its SourcePro C++ toolkit. “You can buy the Standard Library separately, but we didn’t have a lot of revenue tied to it,” he said. SourcePro is a set of components that shields developers from the intricacies of C++. As Rogue Wave’s Apache offering (incubator.apache.org/stdcxx) grows, the company expects to incorporate updated versions of it in SourcePro, Isaacson said.
HP In on the Act
Hewlett-Packard unveiled three Apache projects, all of which are implementations of emerging Web services specifications managed by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium. Developed by HP and The Globus Consortium, Apache WSRF (ws.apache.org/wsrf) is an implementation of the Web services resource framework, a specification that aims to define life-cycle management issues associated with a Web service, said HP’s director of software standards, Judi Cowell. For instance, WSRF specifies whether a service is up and running, or down, and also notes whether configuration changes, such as adding more memory, have occurred.
Also co-developed by HP and The Globus Consortium, Apache Pubscribe (ws.apache.org/pubscribe) is an implementation of the Web services notification specification WSN, which enables Web services to support a publish/subscribe event model and manage the transactions associated with it. Say, for example, that an application subscribes to a Web service that provides current weather information, said Cowell. If that service fails, WSN can turn on another service that provides weather data, handling the associated billing functions, she said.
The Globus Consortium, which counts IBM, Intel, HP and Sun among its members, is a nonprofit organization that promotes open-source grid technologies.
Muse (ws.apache.org/muse) is HP’s implementation of the Web services distributed management (WSD) specification, which was approved by OASIS earlier this year.
Muse provides standard interfaces for managing protocols used among Web services, and deals with performance characteristics such as speed and bandwidth, according to Cowell.
Cowell said that donating code to open-source initiatives helps ensure consistency and interoperability across different development environments. She also noted that HP is likely to implement future versions of all three Apache offerings in its SOA Manager, which today supports the current versions of all three Web services standards.
|