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Numiton who “bring open source PHP to Java” have announced Wordpress in Java.

The so called nWordpress is based on the version 2.5.1 of the popular PHP blogging tool. It is available under GPL like Wordpress and leverages a Spring-MVC-Framework.

Other PHP applications numiton plan to port include Joomla, Drupal as well as Mediawiki, Mantis and DocuWiki. They have a specific porting tool nTile PtoJ, which they claim can convert PHP code to Java EE.

As a justification for the effort, numiton claim that PHP solutions often suffer from sub-optimal code quality, coupled with insufficient tools/IDE support, that makes you wonder how difficult it is to maintain and develop such projects.

They believe, that by porting the to Java EE through an automated process, they will gain easier maintenance and development and be able to establish superior architectures and finally superior tools.

I referred some of you to the iPhone development guide for beginners in the c’t a couple of weeks ago. Now ars technica poicked upt the topic from a similar angle but in English. Read the 4 part intro to iPhone OS development here: http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/iPhone-SDK.ars/1

This won’t be a comprehensive overview, but it should give a feel for the capabilities and limits of the iPhone and its OS, and the challenges developers face in working within those limits.

Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a very good and often quoted paper and in the mean time book to explanation why open source works so well. Besides the good content, it is a metaphor that I like a lot.

Apple’s AppStore seems to work well currently (100m downloads in the first 60 days), but continues to receive criticism for the unpredictable banns for applications (Podcaster and also recently Mailwranlger). Apple takes the freedom to control the content and to remove applications that do not meet the requirements or that they simply do not like in THEIR STORE. Some “contributors” are seriously upset about the devaluation of their sometimes very hard work to provide a piece of software that can only be distributed through a single channel - the AppStore.

Google is yet to prove to be different, but I have good hopes for their “store”, which they call “market”. This sounds much better to me wrt to the expectation I would have for a place to distribute my software through. On the android blog it is announced as

an open content distribution system that will help end users find, purchase, download and install various types of content on their Android-powered devices. The concept is simple: leverage Google’s expertise in infrastructure, search and relevance to connect users with content created by developers like you.

We talk a lot about so called free and open source software (F/OSS). The free is well defined by R. Stallman: “When we call software “free,” we mean that it respects the users’ essential freedoms: the freedom to run it, to study and change it, and to redistribute copies with or without changes. This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech,” not “free beer.” And the OSI has the detailed definition what the open character of open source software consists of. Some enterprise aspects of it are discussed in our white paper The Growth of Open Source Software in Organizations.

So, how do you make money on F/OSS? While for open source this question has been addressed in many of our white papers, the free character is discussed more often, as it excludes some of the more obvious options of commercial open source and services on free and open software. Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail“, has been publishing a couple of articles on the four ways to make money with free:

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Revised: the *four* kinds of FREE

He is defining four ways of free:

Free 1: Paid products subsidizing free products (Gmail)

Free 2: Paying later subsidizing free now (your ink jet printer)

Free 3: Premium/Freemium (5 bucks for Flickr pro)

Free 4: Gift economy (people give things away for non-quantifiable reward)

I like the visualizations which are similar to what we often flip chart when explaining web 2.0 business models. Look out for his new book “free”.

Another not directly quantifiable impact of free is quoted on the article Businesses Can Win the Competition Against Open-Source Technology:

“Ultimately, from the point of view of the buyer, free products provide an important benefit. “Even if consumers do not end up adopting the free product, it can act as a credible threat to the commercial firm, forcing it to both lower prices and invest more in product innovation,” …

Did I mention our enterprise open source directory recently?

In the ugly dispute between Ning and Widgetlaboratory, the innocently bystanding users are (mostly) well. Widgetlaboratory used to sell widgets for around $30 per month and is the most popular widget creator on Ning. Users who have spent quite some money also on WL widgets to build up their social networks were left with nothing, when Ning decided to remove all widgets created by the popular premium developer because of some violation of Terms of use without notice. While the parties continue to “communicate via blogs” (Ning and Widgetlaboratory), the bold move is the one of WL to open source all their widgets and thus giving the users the control they need to keep up their networks.

We believe that our customers have the RIGHT to OWN their sites, OWN their site content, OWN their own code, and OWN the right to not be terminated, threatened or cajoled by ANYONE, especially a hosting-company executive.

Whatever the issue between the two vendors really is (and who is right), the users benefit from open source.

The http://lwuit.dev.java.net/“>light-weight user interface toolkit for Java ME (LWUIT) has been released as open source. Sun has selected GPLv2 and the classpath exception license, which allows developers to link this library statically or dynamically with other modules under other licenses.

LWUIT is a library that helps creating rich Java ME applications through a MVC (model view controller) approach. It supports visual components, theming, transitions, animation etc. Just like JavaFX. But while both LWUIT and JavaFX enable creating a better and more compelling user interface for mobile and other devices, there are really two target generations:

LWUIT will help Java MIDP and Swing developers to enhance the interfaces of new or existing Java ME applications on MIDP 2.0 phones. The LWUIT library which offers pre-made graphical functions and features that developers can quickly and easily assemble into a compelling interface. JavaFX Mobile is targeted at designers and scripters who are looking to create very rich, very immersive experiences across multiple screens like phone, PC, TV, etc. The level of interactivity and animation and control over the presentation is much higher than that enabled by LWUIT. JavaFX Mobile can also run on MSA-enabled devices i.e. smart phones and high end feature phones.

So it is nice to now have LWUIT for sprucing up existing Java ME programs. For new apps I still strongly suggest to consider JavaFX.

At Optaros, most retailers are asking us the following question:

“We’ve done product ratings and reviews, what social shopping features should we implement in 2009?”

The 2009 Social E-Commerce Guide answers the question:

• Suggested approach to plan for 2009
• 32 different options to consider with links to example websites
• Options categorized by adoption rate among retailers

Get it here.

The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.

The Open Web Foundation is an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

http://openwebfoundation.org/

WordPress have introduced an Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users can now write and manage their blog on the go.

Download from the iTunes AppStore.

The interesting bit is the solution to prevent data loss when receiving a call. Wordpress for iPhone will recover your post after ending the call. You can take pictures on the phone and blog them instantly, iPod touch users are limited to pictures from the photo library.
See pictures of the app in action in the gallery.

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Optaros has written a streamlined web client for Alfresco based entirely on REST (web scripts) and ExtJS. It is called DoCASU, which stands for Document Access for Casual Users, and we’re making it freely-available as an open source project on code.optaros.com.

DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework. DoCASU is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface, but rather offer an alternative for users who require a limited set of features for them to profit from simplicity and ease of use. Already today thousands of users at NXP, a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips, are enjoying the user friendly front end solution.

DoCASU is a showcase of what can be done on top of Alfresco’s Web Script approach with state of the art RIA technologies. Developers can take DoCASU as a start for even more comprehensive (or simplistic) user interfaces, purpose built front ends or just as the base for learning on how to build Alfresco user interfaces and applications leveraging Web Scripts.

It requires Alfresco 2.1.1 or later. The future DoCASU releases will include a drop zone for dragging and dropping files also for desktop interaction, tabbed navigation, configurable skins, usability improvements and more.

Read about the project and download the AMP from code.optaros.com. If you see things that need fixing, create a bug report or fix it yourself and let us know.