GitHub Rebase

GitHub Rebase 30

2009-11-08T00:00:00-08:00

This is the second of many themed Rebases to come…our first was the book edition. In related news, the column has also been going on for over a year now! If you’ve got ideas for projects to feature or themes, don’t be afraid to message me.

Featured Project

ooc is a statically typed, object oriented language with some functional programming hints that’s growing up right here on GitHub. The compiler is currently written in Java, and it boils down to C99 so it can run anywhere. Grab the zip from the Downloads section or clone away and set it up. The language has some neat features: everyone’s favorite generic types, a clean import/use system that makes Ruby’s require look like yesterday’s news, and the cover keyword that allows for some really neat abstractions over types and clean interfacing with other C code. If you’re a language geek or need a breath of fresh air, check it out.

Notably New Projects

rock is an ooc compiler written in ooc, of course. This has some great examples of quite complex ooc code and aims to replace the Java compiler.

ooc-sqlite3 is an SQLite driver that’s also just getting off the ground, but it’s starting to pick up some steam. Next stop: a web framework!

woot is ooc’s first unit testing system, and is headed towards a bright future since it’ll be used to test ooc itself. This dogfood is tasty!

ooc-glew uses GLEW to open up the power of OpenGL to ooc. There’s also a little Ruby magic baked in to generate the bindings since there’s a lot of functions.

Stirling3D is also for the graphically minded. This project is a graphics/physics engine that also hooks into OpenGL and is starting to render some neat stuff.

ooc-yajl is a set of bindings to yajl, a former featured project that is a lightning fast JSON parsing library. It’s also a neat example of how easy it is to hook into C libraries and how the .use files work.

GitHub Rebase 29

2009-10-25T00:00:00-07:00

Time to get your Rebase on! Send me a message about your project if you want to see it featured here, and please check out the Rebase howto as well. I’d love to see more than just web development stuff too. (but don’t stop that either!) Perhaps a collection of computer graphics related projects? AI? Music? You name it, just send me a message!

Featured Project

SubSonic is not your average ORM for .NET. This C# library is a veritable workhorse that follows convention over configuration and even allows developers to choose different data mapping paradigms, one such being Active Record. I wasn’t kidding about the workhorse bit: out of the box, it’s got support for LINQ, connecting to multiple DBs, and even a starter app to get you going. There’s an unbelievable amount of information on how to use it with your flavor of .NET on their wiki, and definitely check out how this shapes up compared to the other available ORMs. Besides, who else can beat screencasts set to Led Zeppelin and Rush?

Notably New Projects

ChicagoBoss claims to bring together the best of Rails and Django into the world of Erlang. Sounds neat, but how exactly does that work? Check out the MVC examples here and even some fledgling API docs for how this framework is shaping up. Another neat thing: Tokyo Tyrant/Cabinet support is built in, so you can key/value store to the list of buzzwords that Boss already has. Get forking!

Firepicker is a Firefox extension that adds a color picker into Firebug. Now, you won’t have to fumble around trying to find a specific application on your OS to do this when you’re playing with CSS in Firebug. Secondly, if you’re new to XUL and Firefox development in the first place, this is a great project to look at to get started. Check out some screenshots and how to install it here.

Papervision3D‘s readme may be short, but don’t let that deter you. It’s better if you just go look for yourself. Ok, so it’s a fully immersable 3D world written in ActionScript that’s open source. Whoever the first person to write a game for this environment is, please invite me to your private beach and/or yacht. There could be a ton of neat ways to implement this: perhaps a more 3D StreetView, planetarium, panoramas, the list goes on and on. Papervision’s dev blog has a lot of neat related links too.

GitHub Rebase 28

2009-10-04T00:00:00-07:00

Now that news from the move has slightly settled down, it’s Rebase time! As always, if you’ve got awesome projects you’d like featured, feel free to send me a message.

Featured Project

yaws is not just another web server. It’s Erlang powered, so you get massive concurrent capabilities right out of the box. It’s got some basic support for dynamic content and plenty of other commonly needed pieces of web functionality that you can see examples of on its home page. There’s also a few web frameworks that use yaws, including ErlyWeb, Erlang Web, and Nitrogen. Not convinced yet? Check out some recent blogs that benchmark yaws against Tornado, nginx, and even Apache. If you’re writing a web app that needs the power and speed of Erlang, be sure to look at yaws and its related frameworks first.

Notably New Projects

testswarm is John Resig of jQuery fame’s latest adventure in advancing the web. I first saw this demoed at Developer Day Boston and was completely blown away. It’s distributed testing for JavaScript, brought to the max. The server basically gives each client a test suite, and they report the status of the tests back for the given browser. You can then watch results flying back to the server in real time. This is a new kind of approach for dealing with browser testing on a grand scale, and it’s definitely worth a watch to see where it goes.

webstats is a Ruby-based web interface to monitoring your Linux web server’s health. Install the gem, run webstats, and you’re done. Currently, you can check out CPU usage, load average, memory usage, disk usage, and disk activity. This is a cheap way to implement monitoring if you’re concerned about it, and it even comes baked in with an email and Growl notifier if something goes haywire.

Visage is another great option in the Ruby world of server stats apps. Unlike the previous entry, this seems to be more of a long term look at server history, and even provides some neat Raphaël graphs of the collectd stats on your system. Check out this blog post for a litttle hint of what it offers, and give it a spin!

ClojureX is an easy way to install the Clojure programming language for OSX. Since it uses submodules that links to the languages’ repo here on GitHub, you can stay up to date with the latest features coming out if you want. It also comes with some editor scripts for both TextMate and emacs. There’s plenty of more info on this blog post.

oh-my-zsh is a collection of great helpers and scripts for your new shell, zsh. Out of the box, it’s now got auto completion for rake and capistrano, git branch names, theme support, and more. It’s also got an auto-updater too if you’re the type that doesn’t like to be bothered by such primitive tasks. If you’re still on bash or haven’t looked into other shells than your default yet, definitely give this a look.

GitHub Rebase 27

2009-09-06T00:00:00-07:00

Rebaaaaaaaase. I’m always looking for great projects to feature, so don’t hesitate to let me know about yours!

Featured Project

redis is a key-value store that just hit 1.0.0. So what? Well, it’s ridiculously fast, can handle sets and lists along with strings as values, it can asynchronously dump its data, supports sharding on the client side, and plenty more that wouldn’t fit here. It’s easier to think of it as a data structures server instead, or as an aptly named ‘REmote DIctionary Server’. The code is all here on GitHub if you’re a C hacker, and its API is well documented. Bindings are already available in Ruby, Python, PHP, and more so you can play around with it today.

Notably New Projects

clevercss is a much less verbose version of CSS that’s Python backed. This means, of course, it obeys the normal Python indentation rules, which ends up being a good thing. Unlike HAML, it tries hard to still look like normal CSS, but it does allow some magic like pseudo-class shortcuts, grouping shortcuts, constants, and even some basic Color and String methods if you’re feeling daring. If you’re a Pythonista and want write CSS easier, definitely give this a look.

TeXorator is a LaTeX viewer that auto-refreshes the document it’s looking at when changes are made. All you need is OSX and LaTeX installed, and you should be set. It also shows errors that may occur during the document’s generation. This definitely seems like a fun and useful project to hack on, and seeing the idea ported to other operating systems would be neat as well.

spde-examples combines two fantastic projects of the Java world: Scala and Processing. Well technically, Spde does the hard stuff, but this repo contains some seriously cool examples of how it can look. You could check out an example applet here, but you’ll be better served by cloning and running it yourself.

philip-rss is the first RSS reader that I can personally stand to use, mostly because it’s integrated deeply into Firefox. The workflow is simple: click Firefox’s built in RSS reader button to subscribe, and then a new RSS icon button in your lower right hand corner gives you a nifty view of your feeds. The UI is minimalist in a good way: it’s simple and doesn’t get in your way. Check out a more visual tutorial and how to install it here.

GitHub Rebase 26

2009-07-26T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to Rebase #26! If you’ve got an interesting project you’d like to see on the column feel free to shoot me a message. I’d love to see more themed Rebases, like the book edition. Perhaps we could have a JSON edition, a hardcore C edition, unknown language edition, and so on. I follow some simple guidelines that you can check out here too.

Featured Project

asi-http-request is the Steven Seagal of HTTP libraries for Objective-C. Drop this guy into your OSX or iPhone application and it’s guaranteed to kick ass. Well, at least your HTTP calls will. The library makes it easy to interact with RESTful services as well as submit multipart/form-data if you’re in the need for it. It also has a boatload of other features including progress delegates, a streamlined interface to uploading files from disk, and background/queueing support. Take a gander at the docs here, including a nice look at what applications are using it. Fork away, punk.

Notably New Projects

deadweight deals with a common problem that many developers face: unused CSS rules. What do you do with them? Comment them out? Leave them for that annoying team member to deal with instead? This project takes the higher ground by analyzing your stylesheets and some given views to determine what selectors you can safely dispose of. You can even use Mechanize to submit forms and make sure you’re shedding your unnecessary CSS.

jquery-visualize is a really nice way to get simple graphs in your application that’s both accessible (read: degrades into tables) and really spiffy looking. It’s as simple as filling up a table with data and then calling $('table').visualize();. Of course, there’s plenty of configuration options like colors, the type of graph, line weights, and more. Try out a demo or download it for yourself.

tokyo-recipes is a collection of Lua scripts that plug directly into Tokyo Cabinet, an extremely efficient and speedy key-value store. There’s plenty of awesome recipes in this cookbook including expiring data based on TTL, map reduce and even a simple high-low betting game If you’re just getting started on writing your own Lua scripts for Tokyo Cabinet or are looking for some real examples of how you can use the plugins to your advantage, take a look at this repo.

weberl is a small Erlang webserver that’s based on web.py. It’s essentially a bare-bones web framework that doesn’t assume much, which is certainly ideal if you’re just getting off the ground or you don’t like too much baggage. This project has just started up and could certainly use the help of both experienced and greenhorn Erlang coders if you’re up for it. Go forth and clone!

Redisent is an interface to the Redis key value-store for PHP. Unlike memcached, Redis persists data, and now with this library you can easily hook in your code to it. It also supports clustering, which allows you to hook up more than one key-value store and set aliases for each. Read up more about Redisent on this great blog post/tutorial for using it.

GitHub Rebase 25

2009-07-12T00:00:00-07:00

It’s the 25th edition of Rebase! If you’re feeling nostalgic and want to dive through the previous issues, check out the archive here.

Featured Project

pinax is a Django-based platform for building awesome web applications quickly. This combination of reusable apps and strong conventions can help get your site off the ground in no time. Nicholas Tollervey puts it best in this blog post:

In our analogy, Django is Lego bricks: it gives you the building blocks you need to build interesting things on the web. […] Pinax is a collection of Lego sets: it gives you a set of off-the-shelf components commonly used in web-development: a wiki, OpenID, Twitter clone and so on

Pinax is packed with plenty of features, not to mention a decent set of docs. Check it out in action on Cloud27, a social networking site built just to show off its features, and definitely check out this talk from DjangoCon 2008 about the framework.

Notably New Projects

data-baby-names is a quick study using R and Ruby to produce some neat graphs about the top 1000 baby names from 1880 to present day. For stats nuts or perhaps new parents, this could be an interesting diversion from your normal routine.

merle isn’t exactly new, but it is sure is notable! This Erlang based memcached client is the slickest way to interface with everyone’s favorite object caching system. If you’re writing a serious web app with Erlang, chances are it’s going to need something as high performance solid as memcached, so save yourself some frustration and check out this first. Read up or peruse the docs if you find yourself needing to integrate some caching in your applicaiton.

weary souls need REST, according to this library. Think of weary as the after-HTTParty. The DSL for declaring a HTTP resource is extremely clean, and it’s really simple to dive down and tinker with the details if necessary. This gem also uses Crack to parse json and xml that your webservice du jour provides.

sykobot is an IRC bot from another universe. No really, it’s the offical bot for #archlinux on Freenode, and it’s got google search, quoting, and plenty of more fun goodies implemented already. The bot is written in Lisp, and it’s already got several active contributors even though it’s been around for nearly 2 weeks. Get forking!

CssMerger is a C# app that allows you to develop CSS in separate files so some cohesion and sanity can be kept while designing your site, and then serves up a single file once deployed. Basically, it works by replacing @import directives with your desired CSS file. If you’re using ASP.NET you should definitely take a look into how this can help you.

GitHub Rebase 24

2009-06-28T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome back to Rebase! Want your project featured? Check out the guidelines and remember: the more information on your README/project page the better!

Featured Project

blue-ridge is a no-hassle JavaScript testing framework. Built on the same principles as Rails such as Convention over Configuration, this combines the power of Rhino, Screw.Unit, Smoke, and env.js so you can test the core logic behind your JS without having to deal with a browser. This is built right into your Rails testing framework of choice, and it even has an interactive console so you can debug your code instead of using a tool like Firebug. By default it assumes you’re using jQuery, but Prototype can be swapped in with barely any effort. Check out this great blog post to see how to get started, and browse around a sample application to see it in action.

Notably New Projects

PNGSquash is for those who love OSX apps and smaller images. Save some bandwidth and some frustration by allowing this app to crush your PNGs for you. Pick from your favorite algorithm for shaving bytes off images such as PNGCrush or OptiPNG to literally squash those bits down. Download the app here if you’d like to try it out.

loli is a Haskell web development DSL inspired by Sinatra that can run on Hack (which is based on Rack). This is a neat way to express a web application that’s both classy and extremely functional. It’s already got some great view template support, including Rails-inspired partials and layouts.

v8-gl fuses the ubiquitious graphics engine, OpenGL, with the speed demon of a JavaScript interpreter, v8. The result is that you can code graphical apps in JS instead of C/C++. This project aims to be a full toolkit, but right now it’s just getting the bindings down so everything is possible in pure JS. The progress so far looks pretty stunning, and I’m sure this project could use your help if you’re of the graphical/gaming type.

bananajour is a wacky name for a slick interface to Git repositories served up over Bonjour. Think of this like gitjour, but with a really nice web application on top of it. Why is this useful? Well, if you happen to be attending certain gatherings without internet access, this is a great way to share your code. If you can’t connect to GitHub, this looks like your best option to get your Git on.

Palette is little Python project that uses the Python Imaging Library to create a color map of any picture. The most interesting visualization it can create is a ‘star’ color wheel, where the length of the ray is proportional to the hue. Here’s what it looks like for our dear friend the Octocat. This could be a neat little project to hack on if you’re new to Python and would like something a bit visual to hack on.

GitHub Rebase 23

2009-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

It’s Rebase time once again!

Featured Project

clojure is a functional programming language based on Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It recently hit a pretty huge milestone and is now freely available for you to fork right here on GitHub. There’s quite a few screencasts about using the language over at blip.tv along with plenty of documentation at their homepage. Want to see Clojure in action? Try out ring or compojure, both web frameworks, or incanter, a statistical computing and graphics environment. If you’re into functional programming and want to harness its power on the JVM, give this language a look.

Notably New Projects

hemlock is a new Adobe Flex based framework that combines the powers of Flash and XMPP through ejabberd to create some killer web applications. (I know, that pun was terrible.) There’s plenty of examples already on their site, and make sure to peruse their Learn page to see how this all comes together.

rip is a brand new packaging system for Ruby that provides a ridiculously useful alternative to those used to dealing with RubyGems. Armed with the ability to install packages from multiple sources, the sharing of virtual environments, dependency checking at install time instead of at runtime and more, this library is definitely going to change the game for those doing serious Ruby work. The project’s readme and homepage has plenty of information, and be sure to check out some of the various blog posts about it.

django-haystack is the latest and greatest search plugin for the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines. Hook it up to Solr, Whoosh or Xapian and get searching. With an API that claims to make any Djangonaut feel right at home, you’re sure to save some time looking through your site’s data if you check out this project first.

ginatra mixes together everyone’s favorite source code management system with Sinatra to produce one classy looking gitweb clone. Don’t take my word for it though, check it out for yourself. If you’re the type that likes to view your git history locally in your browser, set aside some time to get this working for your repositories and you won’t be let down.

tictactoe-scala is pretty self-explanatory, but could be a fun start for those willing to take a look at Scala for its incredible scaling power or even those who want to have a website that can handle over 5000 requests per minute. I tend to learn more by reading a game’s code than a queueing system or web server, and I’m hoping you will too.

GitHub Rebase 22

2009-05-31T00:00:00-07:00

This week it’s Rebase Book Edition! There’s plenty of documentation projects going on at GitHub, and it’s about time they got some attention. Clone yourself a copy, head outside with your laptop, and enjoy a good programming book under the sun.

Vim Recipes is a work-in-progress cookbook for all things Vim. Learn how to use this awesome editor, extend and customize it to your will, and more. There’s a HTML and PDF version available for your consumption.

Sinatra Book aims to be a tutorial and recipes that teaches one to use Sinatra, the classy Ruby web framework. So far, it contains plenty of information about how to get started and some instructions on deployment. Pick up the book here.

Programming Pearls is a rewrite of the book from Bell Labs that’s in Ruby instead of C. This has some great examples of algorithms that are both efficient and elegant and is definitely worth a read.

Git Community Book is one of the best resources online to learn about Git. If you’re just making your first commits then this is a great way to quickly become a Git guru. Even if you’ve been deep within interactive rebases and octopus merges you’re bound to find something new by persuing this great site.

The Ruport Book goes into detail on how to use Ruport in nearly every manner concievable to make your life easier when generating reports. Check out the outline here.

The Book of Recess aims to help readers enjoy PHP development while using the Recess framework. The book explains the structure, architecture, and how to contribute back your own changes to the framework.

Journey to Ramaze covers everything a web developer needs to know to get up and running with Ramaze. If you’re not a fan of the current Ruby web frameworks, this may be worth a read.

Common Java Cookbook is a tome that contains instructions for using open source Java frameworks like Lucene and Velocity to get things done. It also covers basic algorithms and tasks that nearly every Java programmer will need to do at some point. Brush up here.

The Merb Open Source Book is the leading guide on one of the leanest web frameworks out there, Merb. It’s also been translated into quite a few languages. Read up here.

Huge thanks to runpaint for pointing out most of these awesome projects.

GitHub Rebase 21

2009-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome back to Rebase! I’ve set up a new site as an archive for the column and the latest featured projects at http://rebase.github.com. I’d also like to thank everyone who’s contacted me about getting their projects written up. Don’t hesitate to bug me about your project if you would like to see it on the column!

Featured Project

yajl is not just another JSON parsing library. It’s a wicked fast one that’s portable, quite memory efficient, and even supports stream parsing. YAJL also has some pretty slick features on its own, such as comments. Oh? You don’t program in C? Well, that’s alright, there’s bindings for Objective-C, IO and Ruby that you can use. The Ruby one is worth a mention since it includes plenty of benchmarks that boast a huge memory savings along with a decent speed increase. If you’re serious about JSON and its performance in your app, check out this project.

Notably New Projects

The Kember Identity is based off of a neat concept: Try to find the MD5 hash such that md5(string) = string. This elusive object has been dubbed the Kember Identity Hash and is now part of a contest in over 20 languages to attempt to find it. Check out the terms here, and get hunting!

sammy is a Sinatra inspired way to manage your web application’s JavaScript layer with some special sauce added on top of jQuery. The gist is this: define a route and some code that will be executed when your browser visits that URL. There’s also support for running validations after a form has been submitted to a URL, which is definitely something that happens in nearly every web app. Some examples of how this all works live in the repo and there’s also plenty of documentation for you to check out.

cateye is another Lisp clone written in none other than Haskell. It’s definitely a neat outcome of Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours and is definitely neat to check out for newcomers to writing interpreters and the language itself. It also supports some wacky syntax, such as Ruby style lambdas and different literals if you’re sick of seeing too many parens.

ztest is a new unit testing library for PHP 5.3. Any project that enables other developers to get testing is notable in my book. This framework already supports plenty of assertions, terminal output, and templates for populating your database with test data. Great! So why aren’t you using (or forking) it yet?

Erlang-FAQ is a awesome knowledge base for those both new and old to this concurrent language. The source now lives here on GitHub, so if you have your own questions or see corrections, you can fork and submit pull requests, and hopefully they will make their way to the offical Erlang site. Also, if you’re a greenhorn in the ways of Erlang this could be a great resource to dive into.

GitHub Rebase 20

2009-05-03T00:00:00-07:00

Yet another Sunday, yet another Rebase!

Featured Project

compass makes CSS not suck. It’s a flexible CSS meta-framework that ties together the power of SASS (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) and your favorite grid template system, be it 960.gs, Blueprint, or YUI Grids. Compass uses mixins to allow you to easily bring in the styles you want and integrate it without polluting your markup with tons of unnecessary CSS classes. There’s plenty of tutorials for integration with your preferred web framework as well as a great screencast on the project’s wiki. Save yourself some frustration next time you have to implement a site’s layout from the ground up.

Notably New Projects

emerge is the new build system on the block, written in Python. Armed with a ridiculously clean build script and support for fetching edge versions of dependencies from their source code repositories, this could become quite popular. Check out some examples of how simple the build scripts are for Mono and Python. This is definitely some neat stuff for projects just getting started or for those that want to get away from clunkier build systems.

pacgraph doesn’t build projects like the previous entry, but instead lays them out in a graph on your Arch Linux machine. It actually generates some really cool looking visualizations of how different programs depend on each other:

It would be really neat to see this concept applied to other operating systems, so clone away!

GLGestureRecognizer is pretty self-explanatory, but there’s one little catch: it runs on your iPhone. This is an Objective-C implentation of the Javascript $1 Unistroke Recognizer, and it could definitely have a huge impact on new apps. How to integrate this with your Fart Button is up to you, though.

prolog is not what you think. Well, it is. But it’s written in Haskell. Yeah, that blew my mind too. Check out the work that’s been done so far and give this blog post a read about how the interpreter is being implemented. There’s got to be some CS junkies out there that live for this stuff. Get forking.

Finally, if you’ve got a project that deserves some time on Rebase, let me know! This column is meant to be for the community and by the community, and if I happen to skip over your awesome gem, framework, app, or hack don’t hesitate to bug me about it.

GitHub Rebase 19

2009-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

Sorry about the missed weeks here folks, hopefully I’ll be back on track now. Let’s get started!

Featured Project

canary has generated quite a buzz on Twitter this past week since it’s the latest client to go Open Source. This single column Cocoa app does much more than expected: filters to weed out the bad tweets, drag and drop TwitPic integration, easy ways to add/remove/block fellow addicts, and even more. The best part? You can hack on it and add whatever features you’d like! Check out more screenshots and info about what else it can do on its awesome site. Fork away, my twitters!

Notably New Projects

github-cli is a new Python script to help you post to GitHub issues via the new API. This seems it could be a decent competitor to the GitHub RubyGem, and I hope it sees some attention soon from the other Pythonistas hanging out on the site. The gem has a good head start, but I think the Python version could catch up. A la commit!

urlshrink adds a handy shortcut for URL shortening system wide on OSX. It also provides a decent starter on how to add your own service into the mix. You could also integrate this into your own Cocoa or iPhone app and allow your users to shorten URLs there as well. This is definitely an awesome idea, and it would be neat to see it translated over to Windows and Linux as well. Get forking!

gibberish is for those who like Scheme and Jabber/XMPP. Ever wanted them both, together in one place and with plenty of parentheses? Gibberish is your answer! On a more serious note, it seems like the basics are implemented so far but there’s definitely more work to be done. If you’ve got an itch to hack on some Scheme that will actually do something practical, give this project a look.

space-clock is pretty self-explanatory: it’s a sexy looking clock, written in Clojure. This is definitely a fun look into how this language works and how well it integrates with the JVM. It would be pretty interesting to see different styles implemented, so get coding!

jtwitter is a jQuery plugin to fetch updates from Twitter in a ridiculously easy fashion, as per the standard operating procedure with most of this awesome library’s extensions. There’s plenty of options available to you already, so if you’re thinking of putting your twitter stream (perhaps published via the newly featured project!) on your blog, don’t waste your time with other methods when you can do it with literally one line of code.

GitHub Rebase 18

2009-03-30T00:00:00-07:00

First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it…

Yes, git branch doesn’t take a -b flag. Sidewalk and chalk doesn’t edit easily.

Featured Project

synapse Oh, you thought Pidgin was the only (cool) Linux IM client. Enter synapse, your brand spankin’ new XMPP messenger built with Mono. It already boasts quite a few awesome features, from previewing images, following your friends’ tweets, and even syntax highlighting for code blocks. Check out the project’s site for more features or to download it, and fork away if you’re on Ubuntu and need something fun to hack on.

Notably New Projects

donk-remix-generator is your hookup for ridiculous beats while you code. Why download techno music when you could have http://donkdj.com and this python script add ridiculous beats to your favorite songs? I think this could be an interesting challenge: modify this script to make songs sound like other genres. Go forth and fork!

openpyro is not just another ActionScript based framework for creating RIA’s, it’s an awesome one that’s hosted right here on GitHub. It’s got a sick project page, plenty of docs over at the wiki, and a screencast to boot. If you’re starting a new Flash project or perhaps looking to contribute to a budding framework, make sure to check this out.

auto_tagger solves a tricky problem for many Rails developers: tagging releases that go out on your staging and production servers. This new AutoTagger gem attempts to automate this by creating some handy shortcuts to create and push tags. It also comes baked in with some Capistrano tasks as well that will integrate easily with your existing scripts. If you’re still deploying off your repository’s master branch, perhaps it’s time to look into a more structured process, and this gem can definitely help out.

docu faces a problem that every developer loathes: creating documentation. This project seeks to correct this situation for the .NET world. It already creates some slick RDoc-inspired sites, which you can see for yourself here. Combined with a flexible view template system based on Spark, a single command to whip up your docs, and an very redistributable executable, this may become the new standard for documentation in the .NET ecosystem. There’s already 9 forks after roughly 2 weeks of being online, where’s yours?

GitHub Rebase 17

2009-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Rebase time is now! What, 5 notably new projects? How did that happen? I just found so much cool stuff this week I couldn’t help myself. Enjoy!

Featured Project

fitnesse is a Java-based wiki that helps to make sure you build the right code for your clients. Based off of Ward Cunningham’s FIT framework, the project focuses collaborative editing of acceptance tests. (Just make sure you don’t misuse it!) Check out some of unclebob’s videos on how to use FitNesse, and definitely make sure to look at the project’s home page which has a wealth of information about agile methods, TDD, and how to use this project in your daily workflow.

Notably New Projects

yammer.net is pretty straightforward: a .NET wrapper for the Yammer API. kdavie has done a great job with setting up an impressive GitHub Page for a project that is barely a week old. This is a great example for other projects to follow and shows how much having a simple gh-pages branch can make your work really shine.

polyeuler is lgastako’s attempt to complete Project Euler in as many programming languages as possible. Um, Project What?

> Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

If you’re into languages and crazy math problems, give this a look. Maybe you could add your own favorite language in!

wrongzoom is a SIMBL plugin to make the green button on Cocoa apps maximize windows instead of zooming them in to fit content. If that annoys you, it’s definitely worth checking out. This could also be a good base to look at if you want to write a SIMBL plugin for OSX.

every is the freshest batch of syntactic sugar to come out of Rubyland. No seriously, it’s a great shortcut that avoids using Symbol#to_proc. So instead of enum.map {|i| i.floor } or enum.map(&:floor), simply do: enum.every.floor. I’ll be cloning this project once I’m done with this article, and so should you.

reversehttp is an answer to one of HTTP’s problems: polling for updates is bad. With some Erlang magic, this project hopes to make providing services for the web just as easy as requesting services from it. Sponsored by LShift, the company behind RabbitMQ, this project is definitely going places. Check out the project’s website, the specification of how it should work, and some small demos in action.

GitHub Rebase 16

2009-03-09T00:00:00-07:00

It’s time for another Rebase! Let’s get started. (Want to get noticed? Here’s how to improve your chances)

Featured Project

selectorgadget is the swiss-army knife of embeddable bookmarks. It can slice and dice elements on a page and present you with a freshly cut CSS selection for exactly the elements you wanted. If you’ve ever wasted time trying to pick out elements and digging around using Hpricot, jQuery, or Firebug (or worse), stop that and get this in your toolbar now. If you’re still confused as to what it can do, luckily Kyle Maxwell and Andrew Cantino have teamed up to provide us with a nice little screencast along with a demo page at http://www.selectorgadget.com/. Consider this a great little tool that will save any web developer time at some point during their daily work.

Notably New Projects

ninject is a .NET dependency-injection framework from the twisted mind of Nate Kohari. This project has been in the works for quite some time, but it’s just landed on GitHub and is ready for some hot forking action. Read up about what it can do for your application on its homepage or perhaps this interview from last June on InfoQ.

zappit is one of the first projects I’ve seen outside of personal pages and blogs to provide something genuinely useful and interesting solely through its GitHub Page. This page gives you a quick and easy way to give the Zap Reader, a speed reading service. The gist is this: give the site some url or paste what you want to read, click play, and read faster than ever before. Make sure to try it out, it’s quite a different reading experience.

knowyourprivacy is a new way to figure out what kind of information you’re sharing with others through Facebook applications. The application itself is quite simplistic and just in its beginning stages, but it could evolve into a really useful tool for the entire community to see exactly what people can find out about you through the site. If you’re concerned about what’s being shared about you or perhaps just worried your identity might be stolen, give this application and its source a look.

If you’ve got a Git related image, send me a message! As long it doesn’t have the boys from Git Fresh or Larry the Cable Guy’s slogan I’ll probably put it up in a future post.

GitHub Rebase 15

2009-03-01T00:00:00-08:00

Sorry I missed last week, hopefully I can get this out weekly from now on. As always, check out this guide to see what you can do to help your chances of getting noticed. Stats are on hold until next week until I figure out how to not make Octocat cry too much.

Featured Project

keywurl adds a keyword-based search to your Safari address bar. It also makes it easy to add your own commands for sites you want to search often. For instance, you could make a gh keyword that searches GitHub repositories instead of relying on the search bar or being on the site itself. Of course, it’s in Objective-C, and all the source is available if you want to see how plugins for Safari work. alexstaubo has even wrapped up some DMGs for easy installation along with a nice project site as well. This is a ridiculously useful tool for any OSX/Safari user, so check it out!

Notably New Projects

whenever provides a really easy way to write tasks that must be done repeatedly or at a certain time in a simple Ruby DSL. It can even write out crontab files for you based on the commands and times that you give it. Take a look at some examples of the syntax on the project’s wiki.

lawnelephant applies Seinfeld to websites: it’s a web application that does nothing! Well, really, it does so some stuff, and you can even suggest and vote on features that should be built in. What’s really crazy is that it’s all implemented in Scheme. Who knew feature creep could breed an entire website (on purpose)? It’s live at http://lawnelephant.com/ if you want to see it in action.

burst is for those who don’t like Flash and would rather use the Canvas element with some jQuery style chaining and callbacks. The goal of the project is to provide a layer-based animation system (like After Effects) that is easy to build great looking sites with. It’s got a decent start on documentation and it even has an awesome demo/home page. If you’re looking for alternatives to Flash or are willing to contribute to something that may prove useful to plenty of web developers, get forking! (Also, ASCII art in READMEs always rules.)

GitHub Rebase 14

2009-02-17T00:00:00-08:00

Want to get on Rebase? Find out how.

Stats Breakdown

Featured Project

dynomite is an open-source Erlang implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo, a distributed key-data storage that strives for high availability. At Amazon, this system is used from everything from shopping carts to product catalogs, and handles millions of requests along with hundreds of thousands of transactions. Clearly, an open source version could become quite popular and be very useful to others. The project has some great resources including a guide to get started talking to the system through Ruby on their wiki. Fork away and read up on how it works if you’re interested.

Notably New Projects

ceo_campaign_contributions can catch one’s attention simply by its name. This repo hosts a Django app that displays a map of the US showing who gave how much to what candidate from the last election season and when. Ahh, democracy. You can see it on http://www.ceocampaigncontributions.info/

spike is a new OSX application for viewing log files from generated by Ruby on Rails. Usually some deep unix-fu is necessary to effectively extract information from large log files, but this app aims to make it simple, searchable, and fast. Make sure to watch this demo screencast on what it does so far.

diceshaker does exactly what its called, just on your iPhone. It’s a free application, and now the code has been made available here on GitHub! If you’re looking to get into iPhone development this could be a great example, and it’s definitely useful for those who forgot to bring their d20s to the campaign. Check out some screenshots here and fork it!

GitHub Rebase 13

2009-02-08T00:00:00-08:00

$ git rebase --continue

Stats Breakdown

Thanks to Feedzirra, the stats are back!

Featured Project

visor adds a system-wide hotkey that can bring up your terminal, much like games that allow instant access to developer console to tweak settings and run commands. Based on SIMBL, it makes any OSX developer’s life easier one button press at a time. Of course, the hotkey can be configured and it’s a breeze to install: clone, two rake commands, and you’re set (provided you have SIMBL and XCode installed). darwin has been doing an awesome job with picking up where blacktree left off on the project. If you’re looking for an easier way to get to your terminal that’s also pretty slick, try this utility out.

Notably New Projects

coral is mislav’s followup to rtomayko’s declaration that using require 'rubygems' to manage your project’s gems sucks. Developers can’t contribute back easily to gems, they can’t live on the edge easily, there’s no history, and the list just goes on and on. Coral seeks to solve these problems by using Git to organize your gems and adding lots of extra magic in. This new project could definitely be an awesome new tool for many Rubyists, so fork away if you’ve got ideas and are willing to help out.

web-app-theme is an open source design template that has tons of uses: you could be like the author and suck at design, you want to get a site up and running with an visual theme, or perhaps you just want your site to have that special Web 2.0 look (just without all the shiny buttons). It’s got plenty of themes already available, looks fantastic, and is waiting for your contributions.

soundcontrol makes managing and manipulating sounds in your ActionScript projects a lot easier. This helper creates an XML file to configure the sound and various other settings (volume, starting time, looping), and then allows that to be dropped and compiled into your final SWF. For more information, check out pixelate’s blog post on how this is a better workflow for developers and sound designers working with AS3.

GitHub Rebase 12

2009-01-27T00:00:00-08:00

Plenty of awesome projects this week! Oh, you want to be featured too? It’s easy!

Featured Project

ioke is a new JVM-based language that allows the programmer to simplify code until it’s expressive and terse enough by folding layers of abstraction. Drawing on lessons taught by Lisp, Ruby, Io, and Smalltalk, Ioke uses the power of Java platform to make this kind of simplicity and elegance feasible for real world projects. Check out some examples and reasons behind creating the language at ioke.org and its wiki. Ioke’s creator, Ola Bini, blogs constantly about developing language. Of course, you can fork and contribute to it right here on GitHub!

Notably New Projects

chordjerl (pronounced cordial_) is an Erlang implementation of the Chordproject algorithm from MIT. Basically it’s a distributed hash table, or in more academic terms:

Chord is a peer-to-peer lookup algorithm. It allows a distributed set of participants to agree on a single node as a rendezvous point for a given key, without any central coordination.

It doesn’t seem to be used in many applications yet, but there’s plenty of information and papers at their project’s site. If that gets your inner computer scientist fired up, give this project a look.

ring is a Clojure driven HTTP abstraction library that is modeled after WSGI and Rack. By modularizing requests, responses, components, and handlers through a strict and small API, it makes switching frameworks and servers a breeze. If you’re doing anything related to web programming with Clojure, this is worth checking out.

fogbugz-git-integration is pretty much self-explanatory, but definitely deserves some attention. Using a post-receive hook and some special sauce, you can have Git commits reported in your installation of FogBugz. It should be noted that there are plenty of other fogbugz related projects should you need log commits from GitHub or even access their API from Ruby.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

Nick Gerakines [ngerakines] is a certified Erlang badass. (And formerly a Perl one before that!) He’s got a seemingly endless list of projects in the language ranging from API implementations for sites like Facebook and Twitter, plenty of utilities and helpers, to even a testing library for Erlang apps. What’s most impressive though is parts of his Facebook application, I Play WoW, are freely available on GitHub. Currently this app is reporting over 50,000 monthly users, and it’s being served up primarily with the power of Erlang and plenty of magic from CouchDB, Amazon S3, and Xapian. Check out his blog post on the subject to see just how it’s all set up. Needless to say, Nick’s open source contributions and battle-tested projects has earned him this week’s title.

GitHub Rebase 11

2009-01-20T00:00:00-08:00

A bit late, but always delivered. All of the projects and people featured this week crank the volume to 11!

(Stats Breakdown lost its passport on vacation, and hopefully will be back soon.)

Featured Project

disco is the new hotness in running high performing, scalable, and robust data processing. Using the power of MapReduce, an Erlang backend hooks into your custom Python code for executing tasks from full-text indexing to data clustering. It’s as easy as writing two methods: fun_map and fun_reduce! Disco accepts all sorts of data formats, can scale up to huge datasets, and has nice status pages for checking up on the cluster. It can be run on your machine or even EC2, and it comes with plenty of documentation. If you need to do some extreme number crunching or happen to have a few teraflop systems sitting around, check this project out!

Notably New Projects

potion is why the lucky stiff’s latest experiment. This time the mad scientist is cooking up a new language that’s object and mixin oriented. The gist of the language is simple: everything is an object, but objects aren’t everything. Potion seeks to make a clear distinction between the data and methods an object has, and allows methods to be swapped or altered very easily. If you’re interested in VM design or want to contribute to a budding language, fork away!

jquery-form-prompt has something that I tend to have in every web development project: input elements that have some default text, then disappear when the text box gains focus or is clicked on. hpoydar has wrapped this up into a JQuery plugin that shrinks it down to one line: $('input#email').form_prompt('Email'); It also never touches the actual input element given, it makes an overlay instead so your backend doesn’t have to deal with the default case.

jscocoa allows you to write Cocoa applications in JavaScript. Sounds crazy, but it’s possible! It allows you to call Objective C or plain ‘ol C code from JS along with inheriting from Obj-C classes. See it in action in the Elysium MIDI synthesizer, "check out the project’s site":http://inexdo.com/JSCocoa, or read up on how it works.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

Leonid Volnitsky [lvv] is a C++ hacker who works mainly on a utility library filled with tons of goodies and also a library that aims to optimize the language even more using some crazy math. What really caught my eye though is a project that can help out the community on GitHub as a whole: git-prompt. He took the idea behind putting your branch name in your prompt to a whole new level. This script allows you to track branches, the modified state of files that you’re working on, and can even show if your HEAD is detached. Who needs git status when bash can just tell you everything? Check out the site for more information on what it can do and definitely watch out for more awesome code from him!

GitHub Rebase 10

2009-01-11T00:00:00-08:00

And we’re back! Rebase went on a bit of hiatus, but it has returned in full force for 2009. Read on for the latest and greatest coming out of GitHub!

Stats Breakdown

p=. Stats are still on vacation, hopefully they’ll return soon.

Featured Project

metro is a Python driven tool that can easily and flexibly assemble Gentoo Linux releases. Used for the Funtoo project, it claims to be more extensible, consistent, and organized than its competitor, the Gentoo Catalyst. Metro allows easy configuration of builds for your own system and architecture with just the tools you want. It also has some awesome wiki articles on how to get started, make your own custom builds, and explaining its various features. It’s a great example of how the Linux community is growing and thriving here on GitHub.

Notably New Projects

irccat is a Java IRC bot that is pretty much self-aware. It can read incoming data from a specific ip and port as well as execute commands, scripts, ~~and world domination~~ from inside a channel. Usually this kind of messaging takes a lot of free time or shell scripting, but this project makes it easy to set up and get started writing your own custom actions. What’s neater is that Last.fm uses irccat for everything from announcing commits, releasing caches on their website, to feeding security camera images into their development channels.

vimeo API implementations are usually a dime a dozen, but this one is definitely one to watch. Built on HTTParty, wrapped up with Jeweler, this gem provides both a simple and more granular way of accessing Vimeo’s API. It’s definitely useful, be it in a new Shoes app that can play videos from the site or if you’re looking to integrate their services into your own projects. It’s also a great example project if you’re looking to implement your own API based gem and need a good starting point.

erlfs is bring cloud computing down the ground by writing their own distributed file system in Erlang. Scaling linearly is the project’s goal: the more computers, the more capacity, throughput, and reliable it gets. That’s awesome, but how does it work? Well, it doesn’t exactly yet. If you’re interested in learning Erlang or contributing to a fledgling project with an awesome idea, fork away.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

xdev hosts the PHP and ActionScript work of both Joshua Rudd and Charles Mastin. This team offers some of the most prolific work in their respective languages on GitHub and truly shows how shops can develop their products in an open source world. Their primary projects include two PHP CMSs, blackbird, a relational data management system that’s good at scaffolding and brickhouse, a seemingly Rails inspired app. They also have some helpful ActionScript helpers along with a flexible mediaplayer that has plenty of demos for you to play with.

If you’re wondering how to get on Rebase, it’s simple! Read the Guide!

GitHub Rebase 9

2008-12-21T00:00:00-08:00

The middle of December has brought us a few feet of snow and the return of graphs! I’m looking for new ways to show off the ridiculous amount of data available on the site (just over 67,000 events in total last week), so if you have any ideas feel free to let me know.

Stats Breakdown

Featured Project*

passenger is quickly becoming the new standard for easy and robust Rails deployment. Also known as mod_rails, this is an Apache module that makes the process of getting your application published and out there so good it’s almost boring. Installation and configuration are dead simple, and it’s being constantly improved and benchmarked against competing deployment systems. If you need more convincing to try it out, RubyInside has a fantastic collection of blog posts, discussions, and tutorials to help you get started.

Notably New Projects

grancher is a helpful little tool that can copy files from one git branch to another. This is awesome for those who have their project’s documentation or other files living in their repositories already but want to move them easily to the gh-pages branch. Check out judofyr’s blog post on how this can be done or Grancher’s docs for everything that it can do.

gaebar stands for Google App Engine Backup and Restore. It’s a Django module that helps with pulling down, backing up, and restoring data on your GAE. What’s really neat is that it stores your data as Python code, and then simply runs that code to bring your data back. If your apps are running off this platform gaebar might just be for you (or if you’re worried about Google ever going down).

mytime is a GTD time tracking tool that is used through the system tray. It’s very alpha right now, but I really like the goals of the project: timed todo lists, tagging for tasks, and plenty of reports to track your time. If you’re looking to get into Java, returning to it, or perhaps want to hone your Swing skills a little, this is a small little project that would be fun to hack on.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

John Resig (jeresig) is the definition of a JavaScript guru. He’s most widely known for creating jQuery (and his blog), but he’s also been hacking on plenty of projects here on GitHub. From processing-js, a port of the Processing language, to fireunit, a Firebug extension for JS unit testing, this guy is just unstoppable. Recently he’s been working on sizzle, a new CSS selector engine that may be used across many different JS libraries. Some of the coolest stuff coming out in JavaScript is from him, so he’s definitely worth following (and rocking out with).

*I had marked Shoes as the featured project when this post first came out, but it had already been featured a while back. Still check it out though, it’s fantastic.

GitHub Rebase 8

2008-12-14T00:00:00-08:00

Welcome to the 8th version of Rebase! I had some issues generating the stats this week, but don’t worry, there’s still plenty of activity and new projects that I’ve got for you. If you’ve got any new ideas for content or data you’d like to see presented, let me know in the comments!

Featured Project

cappuccino takes web application development to a new level. Using a superset of JavaScript called Objective-J, Cappuccino makes it really easy to create sites that look and feel like a desktop application. The API abstracts away the low level details of building a site (HTML, CSS, JS, the DOM, etc) and lets you focus on building your application. Check out 280 Slides to see just how fully featured and integrated the framework is. It also can make some really nice (and addictive) iPhone apps.

Notably New Projects

shudder is a testing framework for JavaScript that’s based on SpiderMonkey. The project is just getting started, but I’m really liking the RSpec inspired syntax of the test cases. This could really pick up some steam if it was proven on some of the bigger JS frameworks or someone ported tests to it.

railroad isn’t exactly new, but it was just imported onto GitHub this last week. If you ever need to visualize the relationships of classes in your Rails or Merb app, Railroad is your answer. It creates files that dot and neato can read and produce some really nice diagrams of how your application is laid out. Check out plenty of more examples on their homepage.

luv: Who needs another MVC web framework? Who needs to test it? And seriously, who needs to write it in Lua? If you answered “I do!” to any or all of the following questions, Luv is your new favorite project. Luv claims to be faster than many of the modern Ruby, Python, and PHP frameworks, so perhaps we’ll see some benchmarks (or demo sites?) soon. Until then, I’m going to be watching and hoping to see something exciting being done with Lua outside of World of Warcraft add-ons.

Hardcore Forker of the Week

John Nunemaker (jnunemaker) is one of the most prolific Rails and Ruby hackers and bloggers and out there. His goal seems to be making coding fun (and slightly wacky too). He started the HTTParty, an easy way to interact with REST and HTTP than mucking around with the other Ruby alternatives. He’s also got plenty of other helpful projects: HappyMapper, an object to xml mapping library, a command line interface to Twitter, and even a way to generate dummy Lorem Ipsum text in your terminal as well. John is always up to something neat and extremely useful here on GitHub, and definitely is worth following just to see what he’s been up to.

GitHub Rebase 7

2008-12-07T00:00:00-08:00

Welcome to the seventh edition of Rebase! Starting this week I’ll be nominating a new repo to the “Featured Project” section on the front page, and explaining why I think it deserves the honor here.

Featured Project

cucumber: Cucumber is fast becoming the standard for acceptance testing in Rails. It’s the replacement for the RSpec story runner, but it doesn’t stop there: it’s now totally free of any RSpec dependencies. The project’s wiki is chock full of helpful examples, ways to use it with other testing frameworks/application platforms, and more. What’s best about it is that it’s mostly written in plain text, something your managers/clients can definitely understand. Take a dive into the BDD mindset if you haven’t already and see how it can help your project out.

Stats Breakdown

Notably New Projects

merb-book: This just got started earlier this week following an announcement on The Merbist and it’s seen a flurry of activity within its first week. The point of the project is to offer superb documentation to those who are willing to try out Merb but don’t necessarily want to pay for one of the other books that will soon be available, and also to provide translations. If you want to see the work in progress, check it out here too: http://book.merbist.com/

perlchallenge: This repo hosts a site that leads you through programming exercises in Perl to hone your craft with the language. (This is a refreshing change from the PGA) If you’re looking to get into Perl, this is a simple and interactive way to get acquainted with it. Are you up for the challenge?

gitextensions: Earlier this week there was a call to action to create a TortoiseGit for Windows, along with an associated git-cheetah project that already has a head start on Explorer integration in Windows. If you’re looking for a way to use Git with Visual Studio 2008 though, look no further than the gitextensions project. They already have a good head start too. If you’re a Windows developer, contributing to either of these projects would mean a lot to the future of Git.

Hardcore Forker

Evan Phoenix (evanphx) is the leader of the Rubinius project, which is a Ruby VM built in mostly Ruby and C++ that lives right here on GitHub. This project is a goldmine for those who want to learn more about VMs or just to see how they’ve implemented some of the features in the Ruby language. He’s turned the project into a truly community focused one: submit a patch and you automatically get commit rights. Contributing is also quite simple: run your favorite Ruby apps on Rubinius, and see if anything is broken or not supported. Evan’s work with Rubinius is a great example of a radical yet successful way to run an open source project that allows contributors to easily jump in, have fun, and make a difference.

I was planning on creating some new monthly graphs for November this week, but it just didn’t work out. There were some holes in my data collection for November and I want to ensure as much accuracy as possible with the graphs. (Also, downloading and parsing ~6200 RSS pages with 30 events each takes a chunk of time too). Consider this a raincheck for some cooler ones at the end of this month.

GitHub Rebase 6

2008-11-30T00:00:00-08:00

Welcome to the sixth edition of Rebase! (guaranteed 100% tryptophan free)

Stats Breakdown

(GitHub users definitely love their football and turkey. Check out the huge drop on 11/27!)

Notably New Projects

webarchiver is a tiny Objective-C project that allows the creation of Safari .webarchive files, which is a convenient way of storing all of a website’s files: css, js, images along with HTML. This is way easier than looking up all of the files for a site manually, and it’s a command line tool so you won’t need to open your browser to do it. Not really portable though, but it’s fast and easy on OSX. More information here.

jss is simple: CSS3 support in any browser that already supports jQuery. Sounds awesome to me! Comes with plenty of tests, a ridiculously simple API, and even caching. Check this out if you want to live on the edge of CSS design.

suprdate is a kickass DSL for working with dates in Ruby. Makes traversal and iteration of dates really easy, and suprisingly has an infinite loop built into it. Who says you can’t model the end of time in code? Can also filter dates, make ranges, and much more. If you need to do anything complicated with long spans dates in Ruby, I’d check suprdate first.

Hardcore Forkers

Pieter de Bie (pieter) is the brains behind GitX, a gui app for browsing your git repositories on OSX. GitX is definitely way easier on the eyes and mind if you need a break from the command line. This alone qualifies him as a hardcore forker in my book. Lately he’s also been hacking on Safari plugins. This is definitely one to watch if you’re into OSX/Cocoa/Objective-C development.

Antonin Hildebrand (woid) is up to some really neat things here on GitHub that deserved to be checked out even if you’re not a Pythonista. Probably the most useful is firepython, which allows for console logging of your Python app, be it Django or what have you, through Firebug. And it looks pretty slick too. Another upcoming creation of his is drydrop, which uses git and Google App Engine to deploy static HTML sites without needing to know Python.

Neuros Technology (neuros) is a shining example of a company that has really embraced the open source community and transparency in the development process. They offer a set-top box that can organize, archive, and play nearly any video content online, and the code that runs it is completely open (and here on GitHub!). Oh yeah, they also have occasional bounties for features if you’re looking to earn some money on open-source hacking.

That’s it for this week! Next time I’m going to attempt to figure out the trends for the month of November, to see which weeks were the most active and get a better gist of the site activity overall.

GitHub Rebase 5

2008-11-23T00:00:00-08:00

I’ve done some serious work towards generating more accurate statistics this week. If you’re interested in how the graphs are made, check out my rebase project. I’m going to be consistently pulling stats from Sunday 00:00 UTC to Saturday 23:59 UTC for now on (instead of doing it ad-hoc).

Stats Breakdown

Notable Projects

couchdbx This is a native OSX client for CouchDB that helps with starting/stopping the service and pulling the admin interface up for it (called Futon. awesome name). This is a fork of the project that lives mainly on Google Code. If you’re using CouchDB on OSX, definitely check this out.

xna-games Finding example code for XNA game development in C# was always a bit of a pain, but lo and behold, plenty exists here. (and even more here!). This repository hosts a few separate games along with a few toolkit projects to help out. A decent starting point for those who want to play around with XNA on GitHub.

filezoo Visualizing filesystems has always been a tough task, but filezoo seeks to make it fun, fast, and easy to use. It uses Mono, Cairo, and Gtk# and looks pretty neat. Also, the author is keeping track of his work and even posting sketches of his thought process on his blog. Open source development at its best: open, free, and damn cool.

Hardcore Forkers

jflam John Lam is the leader of the IronRuby project over at Microsoft, which is the .NET implementation of Ruby. He’s very active on GitHub, and he actually had the most forks out of any user this week! He’s also a contributor to the rubyspec project, which is the way of determining the behavior for the Ruby language and is used across other VM projects as well.

drf Dario Freddi has been up to a ridiculous amount of commits this week. (nearly 700!) He’s the brains behind the PowerDevil application on KDE, which finely tunes your laptop’s power usage to squeak out a few more minutes when you’re far away from a power outlet. This week he’s been hard at work on a few tools for package distribution on Arch Linux.

umonkey Justin Forest‘s project molinos-cms has been featured on the column before for its huge amount of commits, and this time I had to figure out what all of the activity was about. It’s a PHP based CMS that seems to be based in Russian, and plenty of work is being done on it. Check out their translated blog for screenshots, features, and more information about what he’s been up to. Hopefully they’ll get some fluent English contributors soon as well.

GitHub Rebase 4

2008-11-16T00:00:00-08:00

Sorry about the delay on this one folks. Enjoy! :)

Stats Breakdown

Notable Projects

acts_like_git: Crappy name, but this Rails plugin really does some neat stuff. It allows you to essentially wrap a model around a git repository. This plugin has been in the works for a while, but court3nay announced that it’s ready for the world this week. This is definitely an awesome example of collaboration and cooperation on GitHub!
activeritalin: I just had to check out this project. This disables find_by_sql to prevent ugly hacks and shortcuts from cropping up in your app. What’s better is that it adds a new method, find_by_sql_with_excuse to really ensure that you have to think twice about it. Who needs coding standards when you can just have a plugin enforce it?
roxy: This is a fantastically easy way to make your Ruby code extendable and easier to use. In a manner similar to association extensions and named scopes in Rails, Roxy allows you do define proxy methods on the fly. Check out rwdaigle’s blog post for some more examples.

Active Repos

Most Commits		Most Watches		Most Wikis
dotfiles	174	roxy	44	reactor	7
poolparty	156	hoshi	33	media	5
molinos-cms	130	rails_dev_mode_performance	18	kanodojo	4
echowaves	129	wildflower	17	integral	4
digispeaker	125	yui-examples	16	tuxmate	3

Next week I’m going to start a “Hardcore Forkers” section that will feature users who have been active on the site. Let me know if you have any other ideas for the column.

GitHub Rebase 3

2008-11-08T00:00:00-08:00

This week I’ve changed the graphs around quite a bit! The activity on the site just continues to increase, and surprisingly it didn’t take a hit because of RubyConf.

Stats Breakdown

Notably New Projects

Settingslogic: Globally accessible settings in an ERB-enabled YML file. Where can I get some? Check out some more examples in binarylogic’s blog post about the plugin.

scanty: A Sinatra-driven blog from adamwiggins. I haven’t had the chance to look at any Sinatra apps, but this will definitely be my starting point. See it live on his blog.

hoshi: A new, clean way of defining HTML/XML views in pure Ruby. Definitely would be nice for apps that need a template system or HTML output quickly and easily. Tons of examples here.

Workaholic Repos

factor, 774 commits: The Factor programming language
digispeaker, 508 commits: From their site, ‘internet connected 100W stereo amplifier embedded in a pair of speakers’
votereport, 185 commits: Kept track of election voting at http://twittervotereport.com
poolparty, 179 commits: Second week in a row! Easily create scalable sites running on cloud computing. More here.
typus, 133 commits: Super easy admin interface for your Rails site. Plenty of screenshots on the project’s wiki

As always, suggestions for improvements (and projects to cover!) are welcome. I’d love to break down the huge spikes in the activity or perhaps add an entirely new graph. I would also like to see some projects using other languages than Ruby next week.

GitHub Rebase 2

2008-11-02T00:00:00-07:00

It looks like I’ve been enlisted as an official blogger to bring you the latest and greatest work that’s coming out of GitHub! Sit back, ogle at the graphs, and fork away.

Stats Breakdown

Notably New Projects

Authlogic: The self proclaimed “Chuck Norris of authentication solutions.” It’s a new, refreshing look at doing authentication in Rails (and any framework, really) that doesn’t rely on generators to inject code into your app. Still needs a lot of documentation and tutorials, but it’s definitely looking promising. (Note: the project’s first commit was on 10/24, but it started really gaining watchers and attention this week.)

Ronin: Simply put, Ronin is a hacker’s swiss army knife. You can test your apps for security vulnerabilities with it or even punch holes through your servers via a multitude of different protocols. This project lived on RubyForge for a while, but it’s just nestled into a new home here on GitHub. Clone away!

roleful: A DSL-ified way to describe permissions for objects, such as when you need to define what different classes/levels of users can do inside of your application. Keeps your models clean and is quite elegant in its execution.

Most Watched

cached_externals, 63 new watchers (New Capistrano extension for linking to external gems/plugins, etc)

homoiconic, 61 new watchers (A new code blog from the author of Raganwald)

rack-cache, 32 new watchers (Drop-in caching for Rack based apps…ETag, Expires, Cache-Control, and so on)

Workaholic Repos

rubinius, 216 commits
rubber, 195 commits
mangos, 163 commits
poolparty, 134 commits
dotfiles, 133 commits

Next week I’d love to get a new graph up, perhaps hourly events so we can really see what times of day the hackers come out. If you’ve got any suggestions, let me know!

GitHub Rebase 1

2008-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

This is the start of a new weekly column that going to recap some of the action that’s been happening on GitHub during the past week. My goals with this column include:

Prove that Git is a great choice for version control!
See how active the community at GitHub really is and what they’re working on.
Show how Open Source development is truly open.
Using the magic of feed-normalizer, hpricot, and gchartrb, I’ve created a little Rails app (dubbed Rebase, of course) that I can use to rip all of the events that are going on at GitHub. I’m going to try to keep the format of the column consistent, but I definitely need your feedback to make it better.

Stats Breakdown

And, just for fun:

Notably New Projects

Each week I’m going to look over some interesting new projects that have just showed up on GitHub and explain what they’re about. If you have a project you think I should showcase, let me know and I’ll see about featuring it!

Wysihat: A minimalist’s approach to WYSIWYG/Rich Text Editor. Right now it’s very, very beta, but it has the support of 37Signals so I definitely hope it’s destined for greatness. Once some decent themes are created for it, I’d definitely consider integrating it in some of my sites. This project definitely is growing and needs help, so fork away.

Android: Google announced that their Android framework was going open source and was hosted on Git, so it was clearly only a matter of time before their code landed on GitHub too. They have a ton of projects in their codebase, but it doesn’t seem like all of them have pushed yet. Definitely looks promising though, and I really would like to see how their system works.

acts_as_passive_aggressive: Just in case you ever needed a way to vent on your users, this plugin provides the perfect opportunity. I love the project’s readme.

VoteReport: This is a new Rails site to track the election next week through Twitter. They’ve got quite a lot of documentation on their PBWiki, and I really hope that this site turns out to be a little more useful and fun than watching tweets fly by on Twitter’s election page. If you want to help them get the project up and running before the 4th, go for it!

javascript-xhtml-purifier: A new, robust JS script to sanitize HTML. I can guarantee that at some point most web developers will need to do this, so bookmark or clone away.
Next week I’d love to break down the stats a little more and figure out what commits were the most commented on, and maybe which projects had the most activity. Let me know what you’d like to see in the future!