ONLamp.com
The Open Source Web Platform
Chairman Mao, Software Development, and Viable Alternatives
ONLamp is the source for open source developers
Mao Tse Tung dreamed of a Chinese communist state constantly in the throes of revolution. He thought this would guarantee idealistic purity. What was disastrous for China was actually a given in the world of computing and software development—new and revolutionary products continually being dreamed up and then developed into reality—until somewhat recently. But not unlike China, open source development is no longer based on being revolutionary, but rather on offering viable and successful alternatives to traditional approaches.
Open source and open standards allow and encourage a broad swath of developers to work on a variety of network security, email, game, MySQL, and PHP-related software, applications, and executions. The very nature of open source means that subjects or projects are distributed in such a way that encourages both cooperation and competition.
ONLamp.com regularly deals with thorny problems like prefactoring (restructuring code without changing its external behavior), requirements that demand extreme separation and extreme readability, or those that enable disc mirroring. In addition, there are instructive/inspirational stories like the one detailing the lucrative potential—and creation/design arc—of Korg's affordable music synthesizer that outperforms all others in its class.
Because ONLamp offers 1M pages of comprehensive content to 320,000 unique visitors each month, it has become the source for open source developers, users, and administrators. Over the past year, those articles dealing with the complexities of PHP and FreeBSD have proven to be especially sought after.
Editorial Content
In addition to the content areas noted on the left nav-bar, coverage includes articles such as: "Analyzing Statistics with GNU R;" "Lightweight Web Surfing;" "Company Wide Instant Messaging;" "AJAX on Rails," and much more.
Source Code: The editor of ONLamp goes by the enigmatic name chromatic. He is perhaps best known for his work on automated testing in Perl 5 and the books Running Weblogs with Slash and the Extreme Programming Pocket Guide. His work is about finding and promoting the right projects for developers, users and administrators. “I sometimes wonder,” he says, “if writing about software is more fun than actually writing it. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.”
“ The software isn't finished until the last user is dead.”—Anonymous
