Prestashop wins Open Source Award

Another open source award-- congratulations to the winners!

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that PrestaShop has won the inaugural Open Source E-Commerce Applications Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. Open Source E-Commerce Applications Award is a new category introduced to the Award this year, featuring various different types of type of web applications that simplify buying and selling of products on the Internet.

“This award is a great recognition for PrestaShop's hardworking team and, of course, the contributors who help us enrich our software every day,” said Bruno Lévêque, PrestaShop Co-Founder.

“We are glad to have received this award from both a panel of expert judges and our growing Community -whose members increased threefold in the past year! They have really mobilized to support our project,” adds Sabrina Maréchal, Head of Marketing & Communications for PrestaShop.

“PrestaShop have achieved a lot in a short period of time considering that it is a community driven project, with the product maturing steadily and in a way that will stand the test of time.” Added Paul Anthony, bespoke e-commerce solutions developer and one of the judges for the 2010 Open Source E-Commerce Applications category. “The structure of the product has also given rise to numerous creative implementations, and the community is large enough and responsive enough to cope with these requests for improvement.”

“Every day more than 40,000 merchants use PrestaShop to manage their online activity and we want to continually improve our software for them, as well as our future users and developers,” concludes Bruno Lévêque.

While PrestaShop occupied the top spot in the 2010 Open Source E-Commerce Applications category, popular shopping cart system OpenCart came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by TomatoCart.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has four more categories left, including the Open Source CMS category, for which results will be announced from November 17th through to November 19th.
For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit: https://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home.

Happy Open Sourcing!

Pimcore Wins the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project Award

As a service to the open source community, I'll post awards from the 2010 Open Source Awards this week. Here's the first winner, as seen in Packt's Press Release:

Packt Publishing is pleased to announce that Pimcore has won the Most Promising Open Source Project Award category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. The Most Promising Open Source Project Award, sponsored by OpenCandy, is a revamped category for the Award this year, featuring Open Source projects, whose first release date is less than two years from 9 August, 2010.

“Winning this Award is a huge boost”, said Dietmar Rietsch, the founding member of Pimcore. “It’s not simply about the money either, it’s the recognition of a year of hard work and dedication from the team and Pimcore’s community.”

“Pimcore is an exciting content management system framework which has great long-term prospects. The project is growing at a fast rate and has good support from its community.” Added Marc Delisle, system administrator and one of the judges for the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category. “Pimcore is an easy to use new solution and a high sense of professionalism can be found in everything from the project website to the documentation.”

While Pimcore occupied the top spot in the 2010 Most Promising Open Source Project category, TomatoCMS came in at the first runners up position, while the second runners up position was secured by social networking software package BuddyPress.

With this announcement, the 2010 Open Source Awards has five more categories left, including the Open Source Graphics Software category, for which results will be announced from November 16^th through to November 19^th.

For detailed results on each category and more information about the Award, please visit: https://www.packtpub.com/open-source-awards-home

Book Review: "NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook"

Are you a .Net developer looking for a way to persist complicated object graphs in your applications? If so, I've got a book you might want to take a look at: Packt's "NHibernate 3.0 Cookbook".

The book is written in Packt's 'Cookbook' style, which means it's really a series of short sections that guide you through achieving some goal you want to accomplish with NHibernate. Each section follows a template, with sub-sections "Getting Ready", "How to do it", "How it works", "There's More".

Let's take an example, say "Configuring the Cache". You may not yet know why you would want to configure cache for NHibernate, but you have a look at that section in the book.

- 'Getting Ready' tells you which artifacts you have to download and how to set up your machine

- 'How to do it' tells you which files to open and what to edit, which buttons in your IDE to click, and which scripts need to be run.

- 'How it Works' at last tells you why the actions you have been taking will be effective. This is the 'theory' that tells you how NHibernate works and why you might want to undertake the task you're currently engaged in.

- 'There's More' is yet more material related to the task in some way. In the cache example, this might be some text about how the cache fits in NHibernate, how you can read it or externally affect it, and other material that's a tangent to your task.

So what exactly is covered, in this decidedly hands-on style? Plenty. You get:

- Models and Mapping (sort of basic Hibernate theory)

- How to manage your schema and the parts that reference it

- Sessions and Transactions-- very important for enterprise applications!

- Queries using NHibernate

- Testing with NHibernate

- Data Access Layer concerns

- Extending NHibernate

- Other NHibernate related projects

Embedded in each of those topics (mostly within the 'How it Works' sections) is a lot of valuable advice about transactional applications in general. Any reader can gain some insights from those.

All things considered, I'd recommend this book to any .Net developer who's interested in using NHibernate. There is much good advice here that can be applied in a variety of situations.

The book can be viewed here.

By the way, the folks at Packt have passed along a couple of other items that might be of interest:

1) The results of the 2010 Open Source Awards are nearly in, they will be announced daily by category starting next Monday. As a professional open source advocate, I'll be happy to pass those results along as they are announced.

2) As a SOA practitioner, I have a respect for the IBM suite of products. (Though I do have to admit I'm partial to JBoss' offerings, as they pay my salary!) But if you're an IBM fan, Packt has a special deal this month on their products. See the details here.

Happy Reading!

Book Review: "Spring Dynamic Modules in Action"

Book Review: "Spring Dynamic Modules in Action"

First, let me start with a strong statement: This book is going to be the definitive book on Spring DM, period. Users of Spring DM need to rush out and buy a copy, for this book is a reference that will save countless hours and loads of headaches. The authors (there are 3) have clearly travelled many miles with Spring DM, and their experience is laid out plainly for you to purchase for the measly price of a book. My only caveat: be sure Spring DM is the right tool for the problem you want to solve, for there is some work ahead of you. If you are certain it's the right technology, then this is without question the book you need.

Quick explanation for those unfamiliar with Spring DM and OSGi:

OSGi is a specification meant to help Java be more 'modular' and to help solve classpath issues. OSGi lets you specify, via properties in a manifest file, exactly which versions of which library you want your library to use. (You can even have two versions of the same library in use at the same time in your container!) Spring DM is a framework for integrating OSGi with Spring and a selection of it's sub-projects.

Roughly, here's what you can expect from the book:

- An introduction to OSGi and an explanation of its purpose

- Explanation of how Spring can be used within an OSGi container, review of the currently available containers

- Details about how Spring DM works, and the parts you need to understand

- Details about OSGi services, and how they relate to Spring DM

- In depth best practices for data access, enterprise Java projects, and web applications (includes specific advice for popular web application frameworks)

- Testing practices

- Extended uses of OSGi, including likely future direction

- 500+ pages of advice that will keep your journey with Spring DM clear of potential pitfalls

A big part of what makes this book valuable are the many pieces of advice from the authors as they explain best practices for using various tools. So you want to use Eclipse, Ant or Maven? No problem, these are all covered. About to use MyFaces, Wicket, or DWR? All covered. Are you a Tomcat user or Jetty? Check and check. I'm sure you get the picture-- if you use these tools, the path ahead of you is already blazed and you can avoid some headaches by leveraging the author's experience.

So, a final wrap-up: Spring DM users need to buy this book. It will be worth the cost many times over!

The book can be found here.

Happy OSGi-enabled development!