Committed to Open Source

At Orange11 we believe in open source software. This is software that is of higher standard and rich in its features. The key success factor for this is that there is a vibrant community for the open source initiative. That is why Orange11 does not only use open source software, but also contributes back to the community. This is done by sending code patches and eventually becoming a committer, but also by blogging about our experiences, writing and reviewing books and organizing and speaking at conferences.

For our customer this means that we are much more than just using open source for their projects (which typically means no license costs). We typically know the product inside out and actively contribute, which means we know where the project is going and can actually influence that in case it’s needed, and have access to the code and community in case an issue arises. Also, we will try to get the developed extensions and modifications as part of our projects contributed to the specific open source project. This will ensure that not our customers, but the entire community will maintain and enhance the code. Obviously, this is always done with consent of our customers.

Orange11 contributes to several open source initiatives, but also founded some projects ourselves. Below you’ll find some of our most relevant open source contributions.

• Hibernate – Orange11 started using Hibernate as an answer to the non-usability of entity beans as part of the J2EE stack. When looking for an alternative, Hibernate was chosen as the most promising ORM solution we could use for our projects. Orange11 was actually mentioned on the Hibernate site as one of the first companies to use it in production. We contributed by supplying several and giving training on how to use Hibernate.
• Spring framework – Orange11 has co-founded SpringSource, the commercial company around the Spring framework. We were heavily involved with the development of the framework, next to using it in our projects to enable us to develop lightweight applications for our customers.
• Apache Solr / Lucene – Orange11 is also heavily involved with Apache Lucene / Solr. Currently, three of Orange11’s employees are Lucene committers on the project. We actively work on the development, also implementing some of the most highly wanted features, like spatial search and result grouping.
• Axon framework – Orange11 founded the Axon framework as a set of buyilding blocks for Java developer to start building application using the CQRS architectural pattern. This pattern is very popular and widely used, but the Axon framework is the first and only framework in the Java space that helps developers in this respect.
• Apache Wicket – Orange11 has been using Wicket for its projects for many years now and actively contributes to its success by providing patches, being very active on the mailing list and historically organizing the Wicket User Group.
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT) – Orange11 has embraced GWT in its really early stages and advocating its use to others at conferences and to our customers. Orange11’s CTO and two collegues have also written a book on getting started with GWT.
• GWToolbox – Being a big advocate of GWT, we have improved the usability of GWT by starting our own initiative to provide IoC and other much wanted features to GWT by means of this open source project.
• Direct Web Remoting (DWR) – In order to provide easy Ajax functionality to Java applications, the DWR project is heavily used. Orange11 has contributed to this project, mainly by adding Spring support.
• Apache Hadoop / Mahout – In order to help our customers work with large datasets and provide the mechanisms to retrieve intelligence from it, we are involved with Apache Mahout. We present at conferences, provide patches and are very active on the mailing lists.