Nowadays it seems everyone is engaged in social activities through Facebook, Google+, Twitter and an onslaught of other social offerings. Most of these offerings are proprietary, managed by large commercial entities. And while they often propagate ‘open’ standards, integrating with or even building your own software environment on top of these is a daunting and often expensive task.
Enter Apache Rave!
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), a community-driven open source foundation renowned for producing excellent business friendly software (not just for its world famous Apache HTTP Web Server, but also for many other products like Hadoop, Lucene, Tomcat and nearly 150 other projects) announced today a new kid on the block: Apache Rave will help you build, engage and integrate with the social networks and activities everyone recognizes as THE critical factor driving our software business and user engagement forward.
Apache Rave is the first truly open and independent project providing a concrete and usable platform to leverage and integrate the many social and network activities through a customizable and extendable web-facing engine. It is collaboratively created and supported by individuals from a wide range of commercial and non-commercial organizations and institutes around the world.
By providing a ready-to-use open standards and open source project for building and integrating a widget-based, web-and-social mashup platform to integrate on standards like OpenSocial, W3C Widgets, Activity Streams (and many more), Rave targets both the enterprise world for social intranets and federated application integrations, as well as multi-channel social communities, personalization and content delivery purposes.
There have been, and still are, several isolated open source projects trying to address similar functionalities and requirements. With Apache Rave, we are now bundling several of these earlier efforts on a larger scale with initial support from and code donations of organizations around the world like The MITRE Corporation, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, SURFnet, OSS Watch and Hippo and numerous independent developers.
Apache Rave only started one year ago on March 1, 2011 when it entered the Apache Incubator project. The project has rapidly build up its new platform, already producing eight (monthly) releases so far, and is now planning for a first production-ready v1.0 release. As recognition of this very effective and great collaborative effort, Apache Rave recently received honorable mention in the Black Duck 2011 Open Source Rookies of the Year!
We’re looking forward to meeting and hope you’ll join us at http://rave.apache.org!
Congratulations! Looking forward to watching the project continue to grow