Open Source XML Applications

Over­view

The worlds of XML and other open stand­ards are often closely linked to the world of open source soft­ware, or FOSS (Free Open Source Soft­ware). The open standards/open source com­bin­a­tion can make a com­pel­ling busi­ness model which appeals equally to the tech­nical geek and busi­ness oper­ator. This course presents an over­view of the cur­rent state-of-the-art in open source soft­ware, with a par­tic­u­lar emphasis on XML applic­a­tions and products, cov­er­ing both com­mer­cial and tech­nical viewpoints.

Classes for 2009

Open Source XML Landscape

Taught by Simon Phipps.

The wide­spread adop­tion of XML has been helped, in part, by the timely avail­ab­il­ity of open source soft­ware. Just as XML has risen to become a ubi­quit­ous tech­no­logy since the 1990’s, so the open source land­scape has exten­ded to cover almost every type of applic­a­tion. The land­scape for open source soft­ware has changed sig­ni­fic­antly since the early days of Richard Stallman’s Gnu pro­ject and the begin­nings of the Linux and Apache com­munit­ies. In the last five years the solid plat­form provided by open source applic­a­tion frame­works and core ser­vices such as design tools, data­bases, busi­ness pro­cess engines, UI frame­works and report­ing engines has enabled the devel­op­ment of open source products and applic­a­tions which com­pete strongly with pro­pri­et­ary offer­ings in most main­stream soft­ware sec­tors. This class provides an over­view of the over­all land­scape of open source tech­no­logy, licens­ing mod­els, com­mer­cial mod­els and the link between XML, open stand­ards and open source.

XML Tools and Applic­a­tions with FLOSS

Taught by Michael Sperberg-McQueen.

From the very begin­nings of XML, open source pars­ers and pro­cessors have been freely avail­able to the XML devel­op­ment com­munity. Over the last ten years, build­ing on these basic found­a­tions, a huge lib­rary of free/libre open source soft­ware (FLOSS) has grown up to sup­port and cap­it­al­ise on XML open stand­ards . This class explores some of those XML tools and applic­a­tions — cov­er­ing both the essen­tial and eso­teric — and shows how it can make a real impact for you and your organisation.

Open Source Applic­a­tion Development

Taught by Norm Walsh.

Whether you’re devel­op­ing a small desktop applic­a­tion, a game for a mobile phone or a large scale enter­prise sys­tem, its now pos­sible to develop, test and deploy almost any applic­a­tion using an entirely open source tech­no­logy stack. This class shows how to develop an applic­a­tion using XML with an open source Integ­rated Devel­op­ment Envir­on­ment (IDE), source code con­trol and test­ing suite and deploy it into an open source applic­a­tion framework.

Get­ting Real with Open Source

Taught by Neil Cowles.

Here we put together everything we have learned so far, as we look under the cov­ers of a real life XML product, developed by a com­mer­cial organ­isa­tion as open source soft­ware. The class cov­ers some of the com­mer­cial and busi­ness exper­i­ences, the devel­op­ment pro­cess, the open source com­munity and the XML tech­no­logy behind the product itself.