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Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced July 9 that it is releasing Storm, a generic open-source object relational mapper, which is used in Launchpad, a Web-based collaboration platform for open-source developers.
“Storm is an ORM that simplifies the development of database-backed applications in Python, especially for projects that use very large databases or multiple databases with a seamless Web front end,” said Gustavo Niemeyer, lead developer of Storm at Canonical, in a statement. “Storm is particularly designed to feel very natural to Python programmers, and exposes multiple databases as stores in a clean and easy to use fashion.”
This project has been in development for more than a year for use in Canonical projects. Its most prominent use is in Launchpad and is now publicly available under the LGPLv2 license. This will be the first complete Launchpad component to be released as open-source software.
Launchpad, which was released in early April, is a set of integrated tools that support collaboration and community formation. These include a team management tool, a bug tracker, code hosting, translations, a blueprint tracker and an answer tracker. It enables open-source programmers to work together on fixing bugs by linking separate conversations in external project bug trackers, such as Bugzilla, Roundup, Sourceforge and the Debian BTS, into a single universal bug tracker.