After delving into the world of opensource I have found implementation is emphasised over design. Version control allows for a project to branch off in many directions, which projects may do; this suggests lack of consensus or direction amongst the participants.
What software or websites are useful for collaborative design?
There are literally hundreds more collaboration apps out there and more keep appearing by the day, but these should get you started:
Source Control (Online):
Assembla - Public source is
free, private repositories are paid
Source Forge - Open source only
Google Code - Open source only
Git Hub - Public source is free,
private repositories are paid
Bug Tracking/Project Management
LightHouse - Unlimited open source, paid private projects
FogBugz - Full version is free for up to two developers
BaseCamp - Paid only
Trac - Not hosted (although Assembla hosts it), open source - Python
Bugzilla - Not hosted, open source - Python
Mantis - Not hosted, open source - PHP
Mind Mapping
MindMeister - Free for small
plans, with options to upgrade
Documents
Google Docs - Free
Buzzword - By Adobe - free
Scribd - Free
Graphics
Aviary - I'm not quite sure how
collaborative they are, but I think
you can use their tools that way
Photoshop Express - Another
Adobe product
Picnik - Free
Whiteboards
Scriblink - Free with paid
options
skrbl - Free for public, paid
for private
Dabbleboard - Free and paid
plans
Hosted Wikis
pbwiki - Paid plans
Wikidot - Free with paid plans
Miscellaneous
Acrobat - Part of Adobe's
online suite
Zoho - Fits into a lot of
categories
I've been studying collaborative design early in my Ph.D. (contact me if you want a literature survey draft that I wrote about it a back in 2003).
Anyway, collaborative design applications (as in UML modelers) fall into three categories in terms of timing:
Synchronous - Two people or more editing at same time
Asynchronous - Check-in check-out model, a mess if multiple people edit at the same time.
Hybrid (can share certain things in real time).
In addition, they fall into three categories in terms of metaphores:
- Desktop based - Essentially something like rationale rose with multiple user support
- Whiteboard based - Free canvas, not necessarily structured, sometimes has support for UML recognition. Usually a mess to manage multiple models.
- Hybrids
So this gives you a 3x3 "design space" of tools, and there are research tools inside every one of them.
The problem is that in switching to collaborative work there are many usability issues that are difficult to address. For example, access control, synchronization, awareness, shared viewports, etc. There are some academic advances on these, but they're not necessarily in tools yet.
If this is the topic you're interested in, comment, and I'll post some of the tools I'm familiar with.
I would suggest using a Wiki to document/explore the design.
A mailing list. And opensource projects argue on enough of them. I doubt lack of collaborative tools is where the lack of design emphasis comes from.
In no particular order:
A good email client (I use gmail)
Good wiki software (I use media wiki)
Github or an evolved source repository that allows for easy branching and comments on check ins
A chat room, plain old irc or that built in messenger one
A news group or mailing list (I use the free google one)
Skype
I am somewhat skeptical about collaborative design. From Scobleizer: Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now:
My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to
say that if you asked a group of
Porsche owners what they wanted they’d
tell you things like “smoother ride,
more trunk space, more leg room, etc.”
He’d then say “well, they just
designed a Volvo.”
also from the comment:
Apple never listens to its customers.
In fact, it prides itself on not
listening. If you listen to your
customers, you will never innovate and
you will never be ahead of the curve.
You will always tweak and fix minor
things on what is top of customer mind
that day, week or month.
I agree with the wiki answer. I'd suggest looking at MindTouch. Our company uses them for our Intranet and for other internal and external project collaboration/management.
A wiki (such as ScrewTurn, or MediaWiki) is a good tool to document a project.
BaseCamp by 37 Signals
Microsoft Office Live Meeting
For us, all we use is Adobe Version Cue, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail.
Design wise, Version Cue does the trick in terms of file management really well.
As for Google, well, it helps organizing all of my activities more than very well. I find most collaboration tools, like Basecamp, a tad too restrictive or just not exactly right. Google lets me organize my stuff just the way I want it to be.
For collaborative design ... without a doubt, it's
http://conceptshare.com
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I've found today in my inbox an email from google where they announce that CWS payments API is deprecated
I'm working to create a Chrome extension that I want to release with the in-app payments support to let the user purchase a license to unlock full features. I was oriented to the CWS native payments API, but Google's decision to deprecate the API is a very bad news.
At the moment I've found a nice Wordpress plugin that will manage licensing, I'm thinking of using it to create a licenses backend but I'm not sure about it because it's mainly focused to be used for wordpress themes or plugins, so to implement it on client side for an extension would require some workarounds.
How do you will manage your in app purchases and licensing for Chrome extensions or Electron apps?
Alright, so as I am in the same situation as you are, I did a little bit of research. Here is a summary of my findings and comments on the matter.
There are three things to think about before you get started with the implementation:
The type of payment processing service you want to use;
The way you want to limit features for the free version (and for multiple tiers of plans);
The security of your users information through your extension.
Let's go through each of these one at a time.
1. Type of payment processing
There are two main types of service providers that will allow you to collect payments in you extension. Payment processing platforms are the first type: they allow you to process payments and will generate receipts, but they won't manage the different taxes and regulations of different countries. If you operate solely in one country, or in a few countries where taxes and regulations are the same, this won't affect you.
However, if you have users around the world, especially in Europe, implementing the rules to handle all of the different taxes and regulations can get really complicated and messy. But you have to do it, otherwise you put yourself in a situation where you are at risk of getting fined. That is where the second type comes in: the merchants of record. These are companies that will charge the users on your behalf, removing all of the complexities of taxes and regulations from your plate. They're essentially acting as a reseller of your products. Of course, they take a small cut from your revenue to pay for the weight that they're taking off your shoulders and putting onto their own.
Payment processing platforms will be cheaper (ex.: 2.9% + 0.30$ per transaction for Stripe), while merchant of records take a bigger cut (ex.: 5% + 0.50$ for Paddle). However, if you deal internationally, the 2.1% higher price is likely more advantageous for you, just because it saves you a lot of time and development work.
It's important to note however that merchant of records are unlikely to take on a brand new project, especially for Chrome extensions. That's because the amount of revenue those extensions generate on average is pretty low, and often not really worth it for them. Still, I suggest you hit up a few of them before deciding do go the classic payment processing way, just in case you can get in touch with a salesperson who sees potential in your project and is willing to take you on.
Here are a few merchant of records:
Cleverbridge
2Checkout (offers both MoR and basic payment processing services)
Paddle (does not support new Chrome extensions at the moment)
FastSpring (does not support Chrome extensions anymore, as of 2021)
Here are a few payment processing platforms:
Stripe
Paypal (from my experience, Paypal is a lot less developer friendly than Stripe)
2. Limiting features for free or tiered plans
The way features are limited for non-paying users will differ from one extension to the other.
If the features you want to limit in your extension already rely on a backend, to fetch or process data for example, it would make sense to implement the limitations on the server side. You would simply pass the user's ID, which could be stored in chrome.storage, to each request made to the backend. In addition to that, you could also disable the related elements on the client side, such as hiding or greying out buttons, tabs or fields, to make it clear to the user that those features are locked. You'll want to make sure the limitations are in place on the backend as well however, because otherwise a user could just inspect your extension and enable premium features without paying.
If your extension mostly or only operates on the client-side, then you will have to render the interface conditionally, based on the user's plan. The scripts or interfaces that will be added will most likely have to be returned by a backend, as pretty much anything that is done only on the client-side could potentially be inspected and exploited. In that case, any backend technologies or platforms you are most familiar with can probably be used to set things up.
Keep in mind that most of the payment processing and MoR listed above have APIs and guides on how to implement them securely in apps and websites. However, if you know Wordpress well and can set up a secure communication between your Wordpress and your extension, go ahead. If you want to use an online service like Zapier to link existing authentication and licensing services together, go ahead and do that!
There could be a lot more details in this section - there is a ton of material to cover, so I suggest you look for articles and tutorials online to help guide you in this process if you don't have much experience in the matter.
3. Security
This section won't be long, but it is very important one. No matter which payment processing platform you decide on or how you limit access to features in your extension, it is crucial that you make sure that your users information can never fall into the hands of another user. That includes reverse engineering and exploits of your system.
The more things you decide to handle yourself, the more risk there is, especially if you are not experienced. Keep that in mind when making your decision(s).
That's all for me. I hope that helps a bit!
I know it's probably a lot of information without any detailed "how-to", but without having in-depth knowledge of your product and situation, it is impossible to say what you should do exactly.
P.S.
If that can offer any guidance, here's what I will be doing for my own extension. Seeing as it's already very reliant on a PHP backend, I will add a few features to the backend in order to communicate with the Paddle API. So all of the limitations will be implemented on the backend, and I will add messages and visual indicators on the frontend to inform the free users of what they can and cannot do.
[Edit]
I just received a message from Paddle indicating that they do not support new Chrome extensions at the moment. Sorry for the misleading there.
[Edit: June 2021]
After an update earlier this year, FastSpring has updated their security standards, which makes it unusable within Chrome extensions. After I enquired, their support agents informed me that they do not support Chrome extensions anymore (and that it was only "accidentally" supported before).
I've been considering for some time now to get into be b2b integration business. I've researched the tools available for doing this,
like Oragle's WebLogic Integration, IBM's WebSphere, or Microsoft's BizTalk. They all seem to do the job (each having their ups and downs).
I've also looked at some companies that already are doing this (ex: www.hubspan.com). It seems that b2b integration is very needed service.
Although my background is in integration of commercial products with open source software, I feel that concerning the b2b integration world,
I still feel that I need to feel some blanks.
So basically I'd like to clear a few things concerning all this:
All the frameworks that I previously mentioned are just that, frameworks. They allow to build an application ON TOP of the said frameworks,
they are not itendet ot be a final product. I assume that this is because the integration needs of different companies vary so much,
that an out-of-the-box solution is just not possible. So my question is, do the applications build with the said frameworks vary so much
from business to business, that it's not possible to reuse them?
Also, is it possible to build a single framework of Suppliers and Customers (build a Core of somekind), and connect new Costumers and/or
Suppliers as they come? (this is the way HubSpan did it, not counting the developing of custom Connectors to the Client ERP systems).
Or will I have to do a separate integration for each Customer?
How much work hours is required to complete a typical integration project, (assuming everything is planned and executed properly)?
(For the sake of simplicity, let's say that the integration includes only 'Query Product Price', 'Query Product Availability',
and 'Purchase Order Management'.
And finally, is this a job for a sigle person (can I do this myself?, assuming I have the knowledge to do it) or a team is required?
Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughs and oppinions.
Yes they can vary that much.
It depends on the business. Some will integrate easily while others will need custom modules and connectors
There isn't really a "typical" integration project.
Depends on the size of the project. If you're talking fortune 500 companies then no. If you're talking a local manufacturer and local supply house (presumably small) then maybe.
This is probably a question better asked on the programmers.stackexchange
I think it varies a lot. You should probably define what you mean by B2B, and there are a lot of different types these days. From a BizTalk perspective, it is possible to build an application service provider (ASP) version of B2B but it is hard to do.
The level of customization is one of the factors that drives up cost and the length of the project. I think it is difficult to do B2B alone, usually there is so much business domain knowledge specific to each company that you need those business people to help explain the existing systems.
Thanks,
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I have been reading through the backlog of answered questions on SO regarding "How to promote an open source project". Not surprisingly, many of the answers pointed people to SoureForge/FreshMeat and other sites etc as well as blogging and whatnot. This started me thinking where is the best place to host a project and why?
As my first project is currently hosted on CodePlex, I started to wade through the Google search results to collect information on the pros/cons of each; however the comparisons that I found are rather dated (2+ years old).
http://www.stum.de/2008/12/13/sourceforge-vs-codeplex/
http://www.developmentnow.com/blog/2006/11/codeplex-vs-sourceforge/
http://www.spacesocket.com/forum/thread-6654.html
etc...
So the next question becomes "Should I host my project on multiple sites" to which the following post provides the expected answer (thankfully! as that would be a pain to maintain).
Hosting an open source project at several sites
Based on the current state of various Open Source hosting sites such as CodePlex, GitHub, Google Code, SourceForge, etc, etc is there any notable pros/cons of one site over the other? i.e., should I stick with CodePlex or am I missing out by not using one of the alternatives? Will one bring about more traffic to a new and unknown project?
I plan on exploring each site in more detail to see what they all offer, but given the vast knowledge of the good folks on SO, figured I would start with this question first.
UPDATED
As per erjiang answer below... I am currently using Mercurial for version control, and I am open to anything other than TFS. Also, my current project is only me developing, but future projects may be collaborative so worth considering...
Edit 2015-08-01: This answer is still getting views and votes. It's more than ancient and I'd like to delete it, but since it's the accepted answer, I can't do that. Then again, it's community wiki and the community has kept it up-to-date - thank you for that!
SourceForge has crossed over to the dark side, taking over project and bundling them with Adware (Google GIMP Sourceforge Adware). Avoid at all costs. GitHub is as of now still the most popular one, although there are alternatives (e.g., BitBucket offers unlimited private repos for free for up to 5 users.)
It's crazy how much the landscape changed in the past few years, and if you're reading this in the future, maybe GitHub is no longer the cool product. Bottom line is: There are a plethora of awesome options for whatever source control system you want to use.
Old 2010 information below for the sake of history
Edit: This answer is now ancient. In the past 2 years, GitHub has emerged as the prime Code Hosting place, and whenever I have to create a new OSS project, I don't have the trace of a shadow of a doubt where to go to. Leaving this below for reference.
Indeed, my posting is almost 2 years old (2008) now and not entirely accurate anymore.
Why?
Because I think that SourceForge is insignificant now for open source projects. Okay, this will get me into a lot of trouble, so let me clarify:
I am absolutely convinced that Open Source projects should be run on a DVCS, preferably git or mercurial as they are the most widespread - nothing against Bazaar, but I think it's a bit too obscure. (Edit: SourceForge now offers Mercurial and Bazaar, so that argument doesn't stand anymore. However, following two redesigns I think that SF's image isn't too great. To compare them to the images of companies: While GitHub is Apple, SF is IBM. Rock solid, but a bit dusty)
So if I were to write this posting again, it would be CodePlex vs. GitHub vs. BitBucket, with GitHub being the Winner. But that is a blanket statement, so let me add details. +/- isn't strictly Pro/Con, it's more to highlight different philosophies.
CodePlex
+ Real Mercurial/Git Hosting - no buggy bridge on top of TFS, you have real Mercurial/Git
+ Integrated Wiki that allows to add rich documentation and nice looking pages
+ Bug Tracker and Discussion Forums included
- Source Code browser isn't that great - Diffs appear in a popup and just 'feel' complicated
- Forks and Pull Requests 'not as easy' - the UI could use some work
Overall, CodePlex is still great but I feel it's more suited for single developers or very small teams because the focus of the website is on the Wiki rather than on the source code. It's more a publishing than a collaboration platform. Theoretically you don't need a project homepage, your CodePlex project can be your one stop shop.
GitHub
+ Git Hosting, supports SSL/SSH
+ Network graph allows to see forks and what merged into what when
+ Ability to 'watch' projects - your account page is like a Facebook wall with new checkins
+ Super good diff viewer with the ability to comment on single line changes - see here
+ Forking is a 2-click process, and so is sending pull requests
+ GitHub now has the the GUI tool GitHub for Windows
- Main page is not very 'pretty' for Non-Developers. If you have a Readme in your project (supports some markup languages like Markdown or HTML) it is displayed, but the initial page is the source code
- Wiki isn't that great - it's Markdown, but sometimes formatting feels a bit too complex.
GitHub has a different philosophy than CodePlex: it's all about the source code and about collaboration among devs. The main project page is the most up to date source code. There is a separate Wiki, but that's more intended for Documentation rather than presentation of your project. The network graph is fantastic, although it can get confusing once there are more than about 20 forks (frequently when a high profile project is announced everyone and their dog is forking it, but most forks die quickly). GitHub scales very well to any size.
In fact, GitHub makes it super easy for me to fork a project, apply a fix/patch, commit it to my fork and send a pull request to the author. Together with the Network graph it's really easy to see the commit.
But you most likely need a separate home page to present your project to end users and to provide downloads, as GitHubs download facilities aren't that great.
BitBucket
+ Git/Mercurial
+ Allows private repositories for free, up to 5 users
I haven't used BitBucket enough to make a real comment. The one feature that sets it apart is that private hosting is free, while GitHub charges and Codeplex does not offer it at all.
Google Code
Google Code is not an option anymore.
- Project creation is disabled since March 2015, and the Google service will be permanently closing down in January 25, 2016, as the competing services are simply better.
- It's ugly and it's too complicated to browse the source code (the link is somewhat buried)
I haven't used it so I don't want to say it's bad - it's not. A lot of projects use it and it's very stable and robust, haven't heard much bad from any developer. However, as a matter of personal, subjective opinion the 'design' puts me off.
SVN vs. Git/Mercurial
To reiterate my comment above about SourceForge being obsolete: That is of course a bit harsh. I do however believe that SVN is detrimental for open source projects. First of all, weird metadata requirements to ignore files. On Git or mercurial, you have a file called .gitignore or .hgignore in the root of your source tree which includes a list of files/directories/patterns to ignore. No magic svn:ignore metadata in the .svn folder. This alone blows SVN out of the water for me. If I start a new Visual Studio project I need to then apply that magic metadata, while with Git/mercurial I just copy over one file and be done with it.
Then, the ability to fork, patch and send a pull request is fantastic, especially for small/one-off patches.
Last but not least, SourceForge is still WAY too complex for my taste. It's not a bad host, but it really shows it's age IMHO. That being said, it's still robust and has many mirrors world wide. Also the Bug Tracker is much more sophisticated than the others.
Also, if your project for some reason requires strict contribution rules (which may make sense, e.g. legal protection to make sure the committed code is indeed legally contributed) then a traditional system like SVN hosted on SourceForge may work.
Edit: Wasn't aware that SF finally has distributed hosting. As said above, it's robust but just not the 'cool kid' anymore, and I find it much too complex.
TL;DR
For any small to medium project I whole hearty recommend GitHub, for small projects where you want a nice Web Site as well I'd go with CodePlex and for private projects I'd go with BitBucket. For big projects that require a very sophisticated bug tracker, tons of extra features and a 'real' website, consider Source Forge.
Well, you haven't said what source control system you use, which greatly influences your choices.
(not comprehensive)
Git -> GitHub or Gitorious are the obvious choices
Mercurial -> BitBucket
SVN -> Savannah, SF.net
Bazaar -> Launchpad
CVS -> upgrade to a newer source control system
I'm a Git fan, but Mercurial is pretty awesome as well. I personally use GitHub for it's awesome collaborative features, like easy forking and pull requests.
I want to add that CodePlex isn't very popular in the open-source ecosystem outside of the Microsoft camp, and that's easy to see from their most-downloaded list. It's probably a combination of how naturally Microsoft-centric it is, and also from past stigmas. If you're developing exclusively for .NET or something similar, then that'll change the perspective.
Edit: Also, I would argue that developers don't usually go browsing randomly for interesting projects. You're equally likely to go unnoticed on GitHub as you are on Codeplex, but if someone does discover your project, they'll be more likely to send messages/file bugs/contribute if they already have an account on that website.
Since Github is growing quite fast and seems to be the most prominent among the projects I see these days. It would get my vote.
But I think one doesn't have to mean you can't use the other. I see many projects that use Github for the source and Google Code for the docs. And besides that a Sourceforge link to it aswell.
It doesn't really matter what you use as a primary host, but I would recommend you add your projects on the other sites aswell so it's easy to find it.
This question seems like a duplicate of this one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10490/best-open-source-project-hosting-site
Here was my answer on that question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10490/best-open-source-project-hosting-site/3433969#3433969
In general I think the important pros/cons most significantly relate to the development features offered and the primary audience of each site, which in my above answer I walk through for the four most popular sites.
Quick background: i'm the portal admin for our medium sized company. Currently, our intranet policy is to try to integrate everything into our intranet portal, (which we use mostly as a CMS, with a handful of applications integrated as well). This means that all of our software appears to the end user to come from one site, which is good. But it also means that we have to modify just about every piece of software that we want to incorporate into the website to fit into the portal. The disadvantage of this is that each component of our portal (the cms, the blogging, forums, etc) are not best-of-breed, and to be quite honest, they are pretty bad compared to their free and open source counterparts (wordpress, phpbb, mediawiki, are examples that come to mind). Because the users are forced to use these subpar tools, they aren't happy.
We are currently looking at the other end of the spectrum, where each piece of software in our intranet isn't integrated, but we are able to use best-of-breed free software. We would be able to much more rapidly roll out new services to our company, but the down side is that the services wouldn't be integrated. A users profile in wordpress (movable type, in our case) is not connected to their profile in the other applications, for example. The software overlaps, finding information is more difficult, users aren't happy either.
How does your company balance the ability to rapidly integrate new tools with the desire to have a single coherent interface presented to the user? Do you pick one enterprise platform and force yourselves to stay wtihin its boundries or do you attempt to provide cohesion between many disparate tools?
Unfortunately every tool needs separate analysing and very often difficulty depends on many different factors (technology, frameworks, design). But the most important is integration level and integration points (Identity, interface).
Edit:
btw, good idea would be to spend some time on some prototyping and evaluation of potential solutions.
I friend asked me this today.
Picasa Web has a cool (and frightening :-) feature where it will recognize all the faces in your photo album.
But the PC (desktop) version doesn't have this.
Several reasons I can think of:
They just haven't gotten around to writing the PC version of the code.
They are licensing that feature and it costs a lot more (or isn't available) on the PC.
Takes a lot of processing power (this seems odd b/c MY PC cycles are free to Google, but they have to pay for for cycles consumed on their server.
Any other thoughts?
I'm certain it'll make it out in coming releases but Google is a funny company when it comes to its own competing/complementing services. One thing is for sure, only somebody on the Picasa team could give an accurate answer.
But we could hypothesise several things...
They don't want their code reverse-engineered.
(As you say), they aren't licensed to redist
It's blocked in the dev version by other new features that aren't complete yet
They don't want to release it because they want people to use PicasaWeb as a social photo network.
I don't think processing power is an issue. If they're running it in bulk on their own servers for free, a modern desktop could probably run it without issue.
From my limited contact with face recognition software, it's probably the redistribution issue. When I dealt with it, face recognition was its own little world with extremely high per-CPU licensing costs and tremendous paranoia about code getting loose.
I'm not so sure it's not a processing issue. It took Google's massive servers 30 minutes to run through all my photos. I can only imagine that same task would have taken days on my local machine.
Actually, its in, just in limited functionality when you do a search, there's an icon to find only photos with faces. The experimental passport feature also works that way.
So the answer is:
Not the same base (APIs) available or used and not the same language so its not directly portable.
Not the same software and there are no stated goals to make both apps feature equivalent.
Programmers are limited and their time is too. They make choices as to what implement now.
No idea if this is the case for Picasa, but there's another case where licensing could be the issue. If the server-side code is using code with a restrictive license with DRM (GPL, for example) which restricts how you can distribute modules using the code. Running that module on a web server, where the user only gets the output, is legal under such licenses. If that code was distributed, there would be many legal requirements attached which would likely be very undesirable for commercial software companies, including google. This is one very good reason to have some capabilities only accessible through web services.
This was also the case with Riya (who was arguably the first to market with reliable facial recognition for consumer photo collections).
The biggest reasons are likely:
Processing Time (they can't control
how fast your CPU is and therefore
they can't control the experience).
Facial recognition is very likely to
be process intensive (this was Riya's
stated reason for not doing it
client-side)
The recognition process requires a
LARGE volume of data for processing
that is only accessible on the
server? (In other words, the process needs to spin through millions of faces, not just the faces that you have on your hard drive?)