A way through the license jungle

Currently there are tons of Open Source licenses available: from MIT and CPL to GPL. Actually there are two licenses categories:

• Academic licenses: “Software provided under an academic license is essentially a “gift.” You may use it unencumbered and may relicense your derivative work under a new license of your own choosing.”
• Reciprocal licenses: “Of all the open source licenses, the GPL is the most widely used and is the most influential. Written by the Free Software Foundation’s Richard Stallman, the GPL asks software developers to simultaneously agree to and proffer a bargain to other software developers: “You can use this source code freely, but if you change it and choose to distribute your changes in any form, you must provide your source code to others under the terms of this very bargain.”"

Martin Streicher (from Linux Mag) has written an interesting article, which points out the essentials when dealing with Open Source licenses.It can be found in the IBM developerWork technical library here.

Open source licensing, Part 1: The intent
Open source licensing, Part 2: Academic v. reciprocal

Have a nice day,
Sebastian

Testing web applications is often messy…

The Elenium IDE Firefox Plugin has the potential to make your life a little bit easier.

“Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run.

Selenium IDE is not only recording tool: it is a complete IDE. You can choose to use it’s recording capability, or you may edit your scripts by hand. With autocomplete support and the ability to move commands around quickly, Selenium IDE is the ideal environment for creating Selenium tests no matter what style of tests you prefer.”

Cheers,

Sebastian

AJAX Chat Systems

It was never easy like that to get a chat up and running on your website like nowadays. Here are some links to chat systems powered by AJAX:

• http://www.phpfreechat.net/
• http://www.sterryit.com/chatr/
• http://chategory.sourceforge.net/

Have a nice day,
Sebastian

Getting started with a new Portal project

I have found a set of articles dealing with portal projects from the ground up. Beginning with an introduction to portals and information infrastructure, over the first kick-off at the customers site, ending with a comprehensive description of important things concercing portal project management. Have a look at the overview page here.

Part 1: Getting started
Get an overview of issues that teams face when starting a new portal project and some initial first steps to take. Learn about the types of portals and how the type of portal you choose can influence your planning. You are also introduced to several tools, including a Portlet Matrix and Content Map, which you can use to plan and set up your own portal.

Part 2: Conducting a portal workshop
Find out about the benefits of a portal workshop, where all stakeholders come together to plan the portal’s requirements, features, and high-level architecture.

Part 3: Estimating and tracking
See how to estimate project tasks and keep your portal project on track.

Part 4: Portal and component design
Learn portal, portlet, and content management design considerations and best practices. Download a template that you can use to document your design.

Have a nice weekend,

Sebastian

Javascript libraries roundup

EDevil has posted a large list with Javascript libraries in his blog….check it out: Javascript libraries roundup.

20 CSS Tips and Tricks

Pete Freitag has posted 20 CSS Tips and Tricks:

1. Rounded Corners
2. Rounded Corners without images
3. Creating a Netflix style star ratings
4. Tableless forms
5. Styling Lists with CSS
6. 2 Column Layout Technique
7. 3 Column Layout with CSS
8. 3 Column Fixed width centered layout
9. Printing with CSS
10. Adding a CSS stylesheet to an RSS feed
11. Footer Stick
12. CSS Element Hover Effect
13. Styling Horizontal Rules
14. Clearing Floats
15. CSS Popups
16. Box Punch
17. CSS Badge
18. Orange RSS Buttons with pure CSS
19. 10 CSS Tricks you may not know
20. 10 More CSS Tricks you may not know

Thanks for the effort!

Cheers,
Sebastian