2009年的最佳开源软件奖名单

InfoWorld公布了2009年的最佳开源软件奖名单， 包括了最佳开源开发者工具，最佳开源企业软件，最佳开源网络软件和最佳开源平台和中间件。此外还有历史上最伟大的开源软件，以及10大开源名人堂

一、最佳开源开发者工具
Awards go to the handy BrowserShots service for Web developers, the fast-moving Drools BRMS, Eclipse Web Services Tools, Hadoop and Hive for distributed data processing, the jQuery JavaScript library, the Mono .Net platform, the NetBeans IDE for Java and dynamic languages, the OpenStreetMap mapping project, the PhoneGap framework for mobile application development, and the WebKit browser rendering engine.


BrowserShots
BrowserShots is an amazingly simple and wonderful resource for Web designers and developers. Just go to browsershots.org and enter a URL to see snapshots of your Web page in any number of browsers on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and BSD. Nearly 100 browser versions are running on a distributed network of "shotfactory" computers monitored by BrowserShots volunteers.

Drools
The open source wellspring of JBoss Rules, which is commercially supported by Red Hat, Drools is an exceptional rulebase that is rapidly becoming a full-fledged business rule management system -- and a match for the top enterprise offerings. About the only thing lacking (apart from professional services and training) is sufficient documentation.

The Web Services Tools plug-in for Eclipse -- particularly the Web Services Explorer -- makes building Web service requests as easy as filling out a form, and it's invaluable in debugging Web services applications. Point the Explorer at a service's WSDL, and it will enumerate all the services available at that endpoint. Launch a request at a service, and the Explorer displays the response in either raw or structured form.

Hadoop and Hive
Hadoop and Hive are tools for processing large data sets, as in the terabyte and petabyte range. Hadoop provides a framework that makes it relatively simple to unleash parallel algorithms on large data sets, while Hive lets users execute SQL-like queries against the data. Read the review.

jQuery
The large crowd of JavaScript developers orbiting the jQuery libraries is passionate, devoted, and very creative, resulting in a feast of plug-ins. The attraction of jQuery may rest heavily on a smart design pattern: Every jQuery function returns an object, making it possible to chain together a string of commands in one compact line. Read the review.

Mono
Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .Net Framework. Build ASP.Net, ADO.Net, and Windows Forms applications using Visual Studio -- or code in C# using the Mono project's own MonoDevelop IDE for Linux -- and run the resulting binaries on Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, or yes, Windows.

NetBeans
While most free IDEs have stood still or added non-core features, NetBeans has hewed closely to its mission of providing developers with an IDE that works fast and well with multiple languages. The latest release boosts NetBeans' market-leading support for Ruby and JRuby with remote debugging, significantly advances Groovy capabilities with out-of-the-box Grails support, expands C/C++ capabilities to include profiling, and enables unit testing in PHP.

OpenStreetMap
Location data in Google Maps is free as in beer, but you can't make use of that data just any way you choose. The data in OpenStreetMap, collected from a community of volunteers, is free as in beer and free as in speech. It's an open source project you don't have to be a programmer to contribute to, and the resulting data -- in addition to creating a free wiki world map -- can be freely incorporated in other applications.

WebKit
WebKit is the Web-browser-rendering engine on the iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, and many Nokia handsets, and it appears to be destined for the BlackBerry as well. Will developers futz with native iPhone, Android, Palm, and other mobile SDKs when they can cover multiple platforms by focusing on WebKit and standard Web technologies? WebKit may be the future of mobile development.

二、最佳开源企业软件
Best of open source enterprise software
Tops in business applications are the Compiere and Openbravo ERP systems, Dimdim Web conference software, Drupal for content management, Intalio for process management, Jaspersoft and Pentaho for reporting and BI, Magento for e-commerce, Piwik for Web analytics, and SugarCRM for sales and customer management. And WordPress, the blog publishing platform.

Compiere
Compiere delivers a good general ERP package with basic CRM functionality and easy customization without programming. The community edition covers financials, HR/payroll services, procurement and inventory management, sales, and reporting. It doesn't include a Web-based interface or advanced functionality such as manufacturing and warehouse management, which are covered by Compiere's commercial editions. Read the review.

Dimdim
Dimdim is a CentOS Linux-based streaming media and conferencing server that supports Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox browsers on Windows, Mac, and Linux clients. Users can share PowerPoint and PDF documents, whiteboards, and entire desktops, with audio and video conferencing and public or private chats. Like an open source WebEx, GoToMeeting, or Live Meeting, it is downloadable in a handy VMware appliance.

Drupal
The foundation of so many excellent Web sites ranging from personal blogs to community portals, the flexible Drupal content management system benefits from an abundance of open source (and low cost) compatible modules, very strong community, and commercial support from vendors such as Acquia. Read the review.

Intalio BPM
Intalio checks more boxes on the enterprise-grade BPM requirements list than any open source offering. The community edition includes a BPEL process and human workflow server and a designer based on the Eclipse BPMN Modeler. License the enterprise edition for BAM, ECM, portal, clustering/failover, and support for non-Intel/AMD hardware and operating systems.

JasperSoft BI Suite
JasperReports provides the best overall reporting experience in the open source camp. As expected from enterprise-grade open source solutions, a paid subscription is required to squeeze advanced capabilities from the JasperSoft BI Suite, including ad hoc reporting and OLAP, drag-and-drop AJAX dashboards, and ETL. Read the review.

Magento
Magento leads in e-commerce with catalog and customer management, central administration over multiple storefronts, support for multiple currencies and languages, and strong reporting and analytics. Rules-based promotion tools and proactive alerts rival the real-time order management capabilities of many commercial products.

Openbravo ERP
Openbravo smooths every stage of order fulfillment from the warehouse to delivery, girded by purchasing, accounting, reporting and OLAP, basic customer management, and a flexible open source framework for developing new modules. And unlike rival Compiere, Openbravo provides the same extensive functionality available in the community and professional edition. Read the review.

Pentaho BI Suite
Enterprise features like clustering and repository management require a paid subscription, and Pentaho's dashboards and report creation wizards pale next to those of JasperReports. But Pentaho BI Suite is the top choice for ETL, workflow, OLAP, and multidimensional analysis. Read the review.

Piwik
Piwik aims to be the open source alternative to Google Analytics, and it's gaining fast. Piwik runs on PHP and MySQL; provides a drag-and-drop, widget-driven AJAX dashboard; allows you to track any number of Web sites; and supports multiple user accounts with basic access controls. Plug-ins are available for geolocation and to automate the insertion of Piwik JavaScript code into the pages of Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, and other publishing platforms.

SugarCRM
Sugar Community provides an easy, flexible AJAX-driven Web interface for managing opportunities, customers, and campaigns, backed by a fertile ecosystem of open source and commercial add-ons. A module builder allows everyone to change fields and tables. Forecasting, reporting, Microsoft Office integration, and other advanced features are available only in commercial editions. Read the review.

WordPress
The world's best blog publishing platform, WordPress is one of those free open source projects that has no match even among commercial counterparts. Built on PHP, Apache, and MySQL, WordPress is infinitely customizable and extensible through hundreds of free themes and plug-ins.

三、最佳开源网络软件
Best of open source networking software
Award winners in network and network management are old favorites Cacti and Nagios, the IPCop firewall, Kamailio SIP proxy server, KeePass password manager, Openfiler SAN/NAS appliance, OpenNMS enterprise monitoring system, PacketFence network access control solution, Puppet configuration management framework, and Untangle network security gateway.

Cacti
Cacti provides a complete graphing framework for data of nearly every sort. It includes templates to monitor a wide variety of devices, from Linux and Windows servers to Cisco routers and switches, and collections of contributed templates cover an even greater variety of hardware and software. There really is no comparison to this tool in either the open source or commercial world. Read the review.

IPCop
A fork of Smoothwall Linux, IPCop runs on any old x86 host and simplifies setup with a Web-based management GUI and the use of three color-coded security zones to partition the network. Real-time scrolling graphs show CPU and memory usage, while reports give you traffic statistics on your red, blue, and green zones and the connections established on each network. Read the review.

Kamailio
Kamailio is the open source SIP proxy server formerly known as OpenSER. Used with an Asterisk IP PBX server for phone features, plus a hardware gateway for connection to the outside world, Kamailio brings important call handling and scalability benefits to Asterisk, while also removing the Asterisk server as a single point of failure. Larger organizations get the phone features they need, as well as the added safety of VoIP calls surviving an Asterisk server outage.

KeePass
KeePass is a password manager that runs on Windows (and Mac OS X, Linux, and BSD systems running Mono). It stores passwords for all of your applications and Web sites in a single encrypted database, and lets you retrieve them with a single master password, or a key file stored on a floppy, CD, or USB stick -- or both. You can run KeePass itself from a USB stick and lock it to a Windows user account. Among other nice features, it will generate strong random passwords for you.

Nagios
Nagios is just about everything a system or network administrator could ask for in a monitoring package. The Web GUI is fast and intuitive, the back end is extremely robust, e-mail and SMS notifications can be managed very granularly, and plug-ins exist for a massive array of hardware and software -- almost anything that speaks IP. Nagios' immense capabilities can present a significant learning curve. Read the review.

Openfiler
Openfiler is a SAN/NAS appliance, based on rPath Linux, that joins impressive scalability and storage management capabilities with modest hardware requirements. Openfiler can talk to disk drives on IDE, SAS, SATA, SCSI, or iSCSI interfaces, and it's compatible with popular RAID hardware and Ethernet NICs, including 10 Gigabit controllers from Intel and Broadcom. It's a broad-shouldered storage system that requires some time to learn (or an Openfiler support package). Read the review.

OpenNMS
Open source enterprise monitoring leaders OpenNMS and Zenoss share a number of advanced features that separate them from the likes of Nagios and Cacti and approach the high-end commercial offerings from HP, IBM, and CA. Whereas Zenoss has a broader set of features, thanks to proprietary modules, OpenNMS is purely open source. Customers get all of its advanced functionality free, paying only for support or training services.

Puppet
The Puppet project is bringing the power of open source development and a shared Alexandrian library of system configurations to the aid of system administrators. Described as the "next-generation cfengine," Puppet uses a server, a client, and a declarative language for expressing system configurations to automate server deployments, updates, and other common administration tasks on Linux, BSD, Solaris, and Mac OS X.

Untangle
Untangle bundles numerous open source tools including SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Snort, and L7-filter into a network security gateway software appliance that pretty much does it all: anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, ad blocking, protocol filtering, firewalling, intrusion prevention, VPN, and of course routing with QoS. Untangle even provides updates to the applications, signatures, filters, and category lists along with nice reporting.

四、最佳开源平台和中间件

Best of open source platforms and middleware
Awards go to Jitterbit and Talend in data migration and integration, the Mule service bus and WSO2 modular SOA platform, the fast and lightweight Nginx Web server, the OpenVZ and Xen server virtualization platforms, the VirtualBox desktop virtualization tool, and the Turnkey Linux factory of software appliances.

Jitterbit
Jitterbit is the classic case of less is more: a lightweight and extensible point solution that can shortcut simple data migration projects by weeks. If you’re in need of a quick fix for a one-off migration project, Jitterbit's simple, menu-driven interface takes a lot of the tedium out of profiling application data. Read the review.

Mule ESB
Mule conquers service-oriented application integration with easy deployment, schema-based configuration, easy custom routing and transformation, and a well-stocked resource adapter library, which includes support for SWIFT, Cobol copybooks, and HL7. The lack of hot deployment holds Mule back from larger projects, nor is the stack completely fleshed out with enterprise-grade features, but Mule leads among open source service buses.

Nginx
Lighter, faster, and less resource-intensive than Apache, Nginx necessarily jettisons lots of functionality in favor of raw speed. For instance, Nginx can't handle CGI requests itself, so it proxies to another handler, like spawn-fcgi. But that's the idea: You can run only exactly what you need to run, without spending time and effort to pare down to the bare essentials. Read the review.

OpenVZ
OpenVZ is an OS-level virtualization solution for Linux known for speed, efficiency, and reliability. Similar to Solaris Containers and FreeBSD Jails, OpenVZ creates virtual private servers or multiple isolated instances of the operating system; the guests all share the same kernel. You can distribute more CPU cycles to certain guest containers, limit a specific container to a maximum percentage of overall CPU cycles, and perform live migrations of containers without any special management console.

Talend Open Studio
Talend Open Studio makes an excellent choice for data integration projects large or small, with a low barrier to entry, broad reach via Java and Web services, and a highly distributable architecture. A library of connectors supports a wealth of data sources, while good tools cover nontechnical business analysts and developers. Read the review.

Turnkey Linux
Turnkey Linux is a project devoted to building free, easy-to-install, ready-to-run, Ubuntu-based software appliances. Currently 16 appliances -- Tomcat, LAMP, LAPP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Django, Rails, Drupal, WordPress, and other servers -- are available for download, preconfigured with a minimal OS footprint and packaged as an installable Live CD. Once deployed, Turnkey appliances receive updates and security patches automatically.

VirtualBox
Unless you need the very developer-specific features of VMware Workstation, there is no reason to pay for virtualization software again. Not that VirtualBox won't satisfy developers: If you want to develop and test a multimachine client-server system, you can run multiple VMs on a single system and wire them all together through VirtualBox's virtual LAN. Read the review.

WSO2 Carbon
WSO2 Carbon is the foundation of WSO2's componentized SOA platform. Carbon provides the framework for all of the core functionality -- data services, ESB/routing, process management, registry, monitoring, and security -- allowing you to plug in these components as necessary. The ESB and additional modules for governance and identity are good, the process server is decent, and with Carbon the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Xen
The open source Xen hypervisor is the magic behind the Citrix XenServer server virtualization platform. Xen supports Windows, Linux, Solaris, and BSD as guests, using paravirtualization to achieve near-native performance and supporting unmodified guests on late-model Intel and AMD hardware with virtualization extensions. While free-as-in-speech Xen enables live migrations and other VM management feats from the command line, the free-as-in-beer XenServer includes a Windows-based management console.

五、10大开源名人堂
Top 10 Open Source Hall of Famers
Among the 36 legendary software projects in InfoWorld's Open Source Hall of Fame, these 10 top our list as the most important and valuable. It's a rare software product that has no alternatives, but the software landscape would be far poorer without any one of these nearly indispensable tools.

1. Linux kernel
Linux wasn't the first open source software project, but it was the one that showed the world how powerful community development -- on an Internet scale -- could be. The product of thousands of project contributors, the stable, reliable, and malleable Linux kernel is the foundation of an enormous variety of operating system distributions.

2. GNU utilities and compilers
The GNU Project is the flagship of the free software movement and the source of an amazing variety of tools and utilities that, when combined with the Linux kernel, provide a complete operating system. With the Linux kernel, the GNU utilities and the GNU Compiler Collection make up the holy trinity of the Linux world.

3. Ubuntu
The first principle of Ubuntu is ease-of-use, making it the Linux distribution of choice for novice users and for sellers of PCs with Linux pre-installed. Derived from Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu also benefits from Debian's excellent apt-get package management tool.

4. Three BSDs
Linux isn't the only popular free open source operating system or even the best. FreeBSD is famous for superior reliability and performance. NetBSD is celebrated for supporting a wide range of hardware platforms, including embedded systems and mobile devices. And spiny OpenBSD is touted as perhaps the most secure Unix-like operating system, with a security audit that never stops.

5. Samba
Samba bridges the gaps between Linux/Unix and Windows, allowing Linux and Unix servers to provide file and print services to Windows clients, and Linux and Unix clients to work with Windows file servers. A Samba host can even serve as the primary domain controller for a Windows network.

6. MySQL
What's wrong with using a database you actually like? As the huge and active MySQL user community attests, nothing at all. MySQL's easy administration, excellent read performance, and transparent support for large text and binary objects make it the top choice for many Web sites.

7. BIND
The most popular DNS (Domain Name System) server since the dawn of the Internet, BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) helps to hide those ugly computer IP addresses so that we humans can use simpler names like gobears.com and infoworld.com.

8. Sendmail
Born before the Internet was standardized, flexible Sendmail served as the backbone of the Internet mail system throughout the 1980s and 1990s. It has lost ground to Postfix, Qmail, Exim, and Microsoft Exchange in recent years, but still ranks among the most popular mail transfer agents.

9. OpenSSH and OpenSSL
OpenSSH and OpenSSL bring indispensable tools for secure Internet communications to the world of free and open source. OpenSSH encrypts shell communications to remote computers, addressing the shortcomings in tools such as rlogin and telnet, which send usernames and passwords in clear text. OpenSSL is a software library that allows developers to incorporate SSL or TLS into their Internet applications.

10. Apache
Half of the world's Web sites (112 million and counting) can't be wrong. The Web server that put the "A" in LAMP is still fast, flexible, and secure, with broad operating system and Web programming language support and hundreds of modules available to extend the functionality.