Ask HN: What is your shortlist for hot/popular/trendy Open Source Projects? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your shortlist for hot/popular/trendy Open Source Projects?

34 pointsroder52 comments

Just looking for projects - feel free to give a reason why.

Hot as in cool: Etherpad. Almost one of a kind, taken over and closed down then open sourced after a large backlash. I think a good additional web concept to join wikis and forums and sidebar-chats.

Are you looking for something to use or something to contribute to or what?

If you really care about popular and trendy, get some real data e.g. from http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/ and be surprised that the most popular of the past week are a package of Microsoft Fonts and an ERP, Accounting and CRM app. The most popular of all time are eMule and Azaureus file sharing and Sourceforge.net itself and the Crystal Space 3D SDK.

In fact the most webby looking one in the lists seems to be PHPMyAdmin, of all things.

It's possible that all of the more trendy apps have moved to Github by now.

This page hasn't officially launched yet, but we're working on exposing trending repos: http://github.com/explore

edit: naturally, 5 minutes after I wrote this we decided to go live with it http://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=1069047

Which "ERP, Accounting and CRM app" ?

List seems to change fast.

"Most Active (Overall) (Last 7 Days)", top of the list is:

"PostBooks ERP, accounting, CRM by xTuple - CRM, ERP, Accounting"

It shouldn't change fast if it is based on 7 days of traffic, but who knows what SForge does internally.

LÖVE (http://love2d.org/) -- a 2d game library for Lua. It's simple, easy to use, cross-platform, and allows for convenient distribution of finished products.

(It's not really popular or trendy, but I think it's cool and I like it a lot.)

Thanks for new shiny thing! This does look cool.. what a great excuse for learning Lua!

WebKit/Chrome/V8 are leading the way in web standards implementation, with Firefox/Gecko/TraceMonkey also doing lots of great stuff.

Haskell is really taking off, both in terms of compiler improvements and in the size of the community and available libraries. I'm using it for several projects now.

MagLev, LuaJIT, Unladen Swallow, and V8 (again) are all exciting because they're bringing modern dynamic language VMs closer to Java-like (and sometimes even C-like) speeds.

Android - my phone runs an open source OS, I can install software on it without an app store, and it can run SSH, Python, and Lua. Sweet!

Redis - I wrote about why in October ( http://simonwillison.net/2009/Oct/22/redis/ ) and it's gained some awesome new features since then, including ordered sets and blocking fetch against queues. It's a very different beast from the other stuff that gets branded as NoSQL.

node.js (both the core and projects which build upon it)

"I'd like to see Twisted take advantage of the hype around Node.js -- They're the same! Except Twisted is mature and does more. And is Python" -http://twitter.com/progrium/status/7900106071

sigh.. I know python is cool and all (and I know Jeff (progrium) somewhat), but being able to do development in the front-end and backend with the same language (javascript) makes things so much easier sometimes. I am by no means a python expert (I'm still learning), but the two languages just feel different, and I really really enjoy the prototypical/functional nature of javascript. Maybe python has this as well, and I'm just missing it? Anyway, node.js deserves all the hype it is getting.

There's one key difference between Node.js and Twisted / EventMachine / other non-blocking IO frameworks for existing languages: Node.js doesn't have any blocking function calls. You have to try really, really hard to block your event loop in Node.js. Every single library released for Node.js works asynchronously, and is hence safe to use.

Not having to even worry about whether or not a library I want to use is blocking is a really useful feature.

Try check out Cramp. http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/7/introducing-cramp.

It's built on top of EventMachine - Ruby equivalent of Twisted.

Clojure, Redis

and you can play with both at the same time with redis-clojure: http://github.com/ragnard/redis-clojure that is, Clojure library for Redis.

MongoDB

+1 for MongoDB. I love in particular the lack of structured schema meaning you can arbitrarily modify records without migrating the DB.

Also there's a growing, awesome community.

Django

Django & jQuery - These two tools have made web development fun for me, again.

Clojure/Lisp - I've had a Lisp like language on my languages-to-learn to-do list for long

Redis - Looks like an excellent NoSQL DB to begin learning this new concept with.

Languages: Clojure, plt scheme and (I guess a little) newLISP.

"noSQL": Riak, MongoDB, Redis, (I think the "new-ness" has worn off CouchDB")

Trendy: node.js, ruby on rails, django, lift

*Really any "web framework that promises to make development easier"

mongodb, mongoengine, redis, node, tornado, neo4j, django

want to play with openframeworks and cvtypes, but haven't had time

Jakarta. It may not be hot and trendy, but it's certainly popular

Edit: To the persons who downvoted me. I was not being sarcastic. I use stuff from the Jakarta project on a daily basis.

I didn't downvote you for sarcasm, I had the plan to downvote everyone who posted

{project}

regardless of whether I like or dislike the project, and equally upvote everyone who posted

{project because .. reasons or thoughts or justifications or content which took some time to write ..}

But hardly anyone seems to have bothered, and I feel mean now so I've stopped. :/

The Linux kernel (Popular. Not hot nor trendy). Over the past 12 months, I've touched Redis, Node.js, Clojure, and a few others on this list, but nothing blows my mind more than learning a new system call or OS feature.

Learn the exact copy on write semantics of forking (What happens to file handles? Threads? How does the OS know a paged needs to be copied?), copy two file descriptors with splice, put something in shared memory, move messages over an IPC queue.

If you have any interest/connection with education then http://moodle.org

It's used by millions of people all over the world (http://moodle.org/stats/) and is helping to make education more accessible.

XBMC

I don't know about hot and trendy, but these are a few open source projects that come to mind that make my life and work much, much easier:

  Drupal
  jQuery (included in Drupal)
  Xdebug
  EtherPad
  Adium
  Miro
  Quicksilver
  Clyppan

Math.NET Numerics: http://numerics.mathdotnet.com/

Merging of the two largest open-source .NET math libraries...should be an excellent library when it's complete.

Hadoop and subprojects, specially Pig. It may be written in the unsexiest of languages, but if you have lots of data and need flexibility to do anything you want with it, Hadoop is your best friend.

jQuery

Ruby on Rails, node.js, MongoDB, jQuery, Webkit, Sinatra, HAML+SASS

Ruby on Rails

Tornado and mongodb... primarily beause I'm using them to develop my side project. Also have interests in Cassandra and seeing what happens with it in the future.

Cramp - http://m.onkey.org/2010/1/7/introducing-cramp

Ruby equivalent of Tornado?

PHP, KohanaPHP; Python; PLT-Scheme; Erlang/OTP; PostgreSQL; Apache, Lighttpd; Emacs; Firefox.

Those are the essentials - I'm sure there is more.

http://monotone.ca There's more to distributed VCS than Git.

Dojo They have a comprehensive toolkit for building complex web-app front ends.

Boxee http://www.boxee.tv/

Redis, node.js & sinatra

Also I'm a fan of Catalyst but it's not necessarily hot and trendy...

Riak

Drupal, jQuery, Chrome

Hadoop, Hive, Scribe