eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Black Duck Software has announced the 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year, a list of hot new open-source projects initiated in 2012.
Black Duck reviewed thousands of open-source projects started in 2012 to select this year’s group of Open Source Rookies. This is the fifth year Black Duck has compiled a list of top open-source projects.
The Open Source Rookies program pulls its information from data on open-source projects from Ohloh.net and the Black Duck KnowledgeBase. Using a weighted scoring system, points were awarded based on project activity, commits pace, project team attributes and other factors. Black Duck determined the top 10 projects following an audit of its findings and project scores.
This year, there were clear trends that drove the projects that stood out above the others, the company said. The three clear trends were the evolution of JavaScript, a focus on mobile and making the right choice in programming language.
Black Duck officials said there was significant growth in projects focused on evolving the development frameworks, platforms and tooling around JavaScript. In fact, five of the top 10 picks this year are JavaScript-related projects.
Several of the projects are tackling similar problems, in some cases competing and in other cases working together, to advance the large-scale use of JavaScript for serious application development. The organizations behind these projects ranged in size—some starting from a single developer while others started within some of the biggest tech companies in the world, Black Duck said.
In addition, three of this year’s rookies had a mobile focus, each tackling different aspects of the mobile ecosystem, from development frameworks to real-time video filtering to multi-touch gestures. JavaScript also overlapped in these projects with continued focus on the mobile Web.
Python, Ruby and JavaScript were the standout languages this year, Black Duck said.
The Black Duck 2012 Open Source Rookies of the Year are as follows:
- Ansible is a radically simple configuration-management, deployment and ad hoc task-execution tool.
- Chaplin.js is an architecture for JavaScript applications using the Backbone.js library. It provides a lightweight and flexible structure that features well-proven design patterns and best practices.
- GPUImage is an iOS library that lets you apply GPU-accelerated filters and other effects to images, live camera video and movies.
- Hammer.js is a JavaScript library for multi-touch gestures. It enables gestures for the Web on mobile devices.
- InaSAFE produces realistic natural-hazard-impact scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities.
- Yahoo Mojito is a JavaScript MVC framework for mobile and Web applications running on client and server.
- Sidekiq provides simple, efficient message processing for Ruby.
- Syte is a simple but powerful packaged personal site that has social integrations like Twitter, GitHub, Tumblr, WordPress, Stack Overflow and more.
- Twitter Bower is a package manager for the Web that lets you easily install assets, such as images, CSS and JS, and manages dependencies for you.
- TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript development and provides a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.
Receiving honorable mention was the DCPUToolChain, an assembler, compiler, emulator and integrated development environment for the DCPU-16 virtual CPU.
“The 2012 Rookies demonstrate how community innovation, particularly within the JavaScript and mobile projects, mirrors the needs for innovation in Web experiences, mobile devices and enterprise applications,” Black Duck President and CEO Tim Yeaton, said in a statement. “Being able to identify and showcase these up-and-coming open-source projects is an important part of our mission at Black Duck to bring together the open-source community and businesses around the world.”
Past winners of the prestigious award include Twitter Bootstrap, Cloud Foundry, Mozilla Persona (formerly known as BrowserID), Red Hat OpenShift, Eclipse Orion, Apache Rave, Salt Stack, OpenStack, Diaspora and many other notable projects.
“The Black Duck Open Source Rookie of the Year award gave the Salt project and team a huge boost in 2012; not only was it great publicity, but it helped validate a young and growing project and helped give it the legs it needed to turn into one of the largest projects in the world during 2012,” Thomas S. Hatch, founder and CTO of Salt Stack, said in a statement. “This award has helped Salt grow from a basement project in the beginning of 2012 to a viable company making a real impact in 2013.”
In a prepared statement, Chris Aniszczyk, open-source manager at Twitter, said: “What started out as an initial open-source contribution to make it easier to do asset management on the Web for us has grown into quite a lively project. We are thankful to the Yeoman (@yeoman) project for initially adopting Bower and the community that has built up around Bower. We look forward to where they take the project.”
