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Open Source Topic Center

Welcome to the Open Source topic center. Open source software (OSS) plays an important part in AOL's success by helping us build technologies that are more open, flexible and dynamic. Ted Cahall, who leads the Platforms & Technologies organization, is a leading proponent of open source use at AOL: "Open source software is at the heart of many of AOL's key technologies. Utilizing open source software enables our teams to reap the benefits of incorporating standards-based software into our products and infrastructure, and allows us all to stand on the shoulders of giants."

Since August 2007, AOL's legal and technology teams have partnered to support effective engagement with the open source community. A sample of our involvement is included here.

Open Source Releases

  • AXS Library
    Axs is a small Javascript library that provides methods which make it easier for web developers to implement modern Web 2.0 sites with accessible features. Capabilities include easy keyboard shortcuts, focus control, logging, attaching events along with a working demo page and full documentation.

    Read more at http://dev.aol.com/axs
  • jmxsh
    jmxsh is a scriptable command-line interface to JMX-enabled Java processes using Java/Tcl. It is basically a Tcl interpreter that can talk JMX.

    Read more at http://code.google.com/p/jmxsh/
  • OmniCheck
    OmniCheck is useful as a tool to monitor various program log files, and live program output, and detect patterns in the log entries that require special attention by the administrator or process owner.

    Read more at https://sourceforge.net/projects/omnicheck/?abmode=1
  • Pagetest
    Pagetest is an open source tool for measuring and analyzing web page performance right from your web browser. AOL developed Pagetest internally to automate load time measurement of its many websites, and it has evolved into a powerful tool for web developers and software engineers in testing their web pages and getting instant feedback. We decided to release it to the grander web development community to further help evolve it into an even more useful - and free - web performance tool.

    Read more at http://pagetest.sourceforge.net/
  • wimas3
    If you want to integrate AIM into a Flash, Flex, or AIR app, this project is meant to make it easier for you. This library is at the core of AIM Express 7. We are actively developing the code as we build out our client. We push updates out periodically when we refresh AIM Express 7. We decided to go with straight AS3 libraries. We didn't want to force anyone to use the CS3 components or Flex. This library does not contain any UI. It communicates with the AIM backend using the Web AIM (WIM) protocol in AMF3 format. AIM is used by millions of people. It's the #1 IM network in North America. If your product could benefit from tapping into that network, we're eager to help you.

    Read more at http://code.google.com/p/wimas3/
  • WIM Cocoa Framework
    This Objective-C/Cocoa Framework implements logic for AOL’s openAIM WIM protocol. The framework is UI agnostic – allowing you complete control of how you want to integrate AIM features into your application. This library is the same protocol stack used in the iPhone release of AIM. Protocol documentation and AIM Network license requirements can be located at http://developer.aim.com

    Read more at http://code.google.com/p/wimframework

Open Source Contributions

  • Apache
    AOL teams have recently been involved with the Apache Software Foundation, and specific Apache projects, to help foster new technologies in search and collaborative filtering, to make these products more suitable for a large web property to use. We have done this by encouraging developers in AOL to participate in discussions, to contribute their thoughts and ideas to these projects, as well as mentoring some new initiatives and projects in those fields.

    Lucene and Solr
    As key infrastructure technologies, Apache Lucene and Solr (distributed search and geographic searching) are increasingly used by AOL. However, AOL's involvement is not strictly limited to use. Our teams are also actively participating, with contributions including:

    * Geographical search capabilities to the java lucene search engine.
    * Distributed searching (initial implementation).
    * Database importing handler.

    Hadoop, Hbase and Mahout
    AOL teams have been involved in the development and enhancement of several open source projects for quite some time now and in course of our work we have created a HBase Writer Processor which works with Heritrix and Hadoop in order to write the data crawled by Heritrix (a large scale web-crawler) into a structured distributed database (Hbase). The Hbase Writer Processor plugin is an enhancement to Heritrix that AOL has contributed to the open source community. AOL has also made contributions to a new clustering algorithm, Fuzzy K-Means, for the Mahout project.
  • Dojo Modules for Web AIM
    This collection of JavaScript modules have been written for use with Dojo 1.1. They implement UI widgets and a protocol wrapper for the Web AIM API. By using these modules, you can get a fully functioning AIM-based IM client running in a web page. You can view and manage buddy lists and send/receive IMs. These modules were adapted from the modules used by AOL Webmail. The modules are available under the BSD open source license. The modules use SoundBridge.swf from the BSD-licensed Javascript Sound Kit, and the aim.date module includes some functions from the MIT-licensed Matt Kruse's Javascript Toolbox.

    Read more at http://code.google.com/p/aimdojo/
  • sipXtapi
    sipXtapi is a very comprehensive and fully featured SIP client SDK. It runs on Linux, Windows as well as Mac OS X. Among its features are full voice and video support, NAT traversal (STUN & ICE), as well as a good media processing framework. AOL's AIM and ICQ clients rely on sipXtapi for its voice and video capabilities.

    Read more at     http://sipx-wiki.calivia.com/index.php/Sipxtapi
  • Talend Forge
    Talend Open Studio is an Open Source ETL (extract, load and transform) tool for use in ingesting data from various 3rd parties and storing that data.

    Read more at http://www.talendforge.org/
» Submitted by Developer Network on December 12, 2008 - 12:19pm.