What is Apache Flex? Website Branding Review

Website Brand Review of Apache Flex

Many projects come to Apache from software vendors donating them to the Apache community, where the Apache Incubator works to form an open and independent community around the project. Here, Adobe donated both the code and the brand for their Flex project to Apache. Now, the ASF is the steward both to the vibrant Apache Flex community, as well as the new owner of the Flex brand and registered trademark.

Here’s my quick review of the Apache Flex project, told purely from the point of view of a new user finding the project website. While we’re all familiar with Adobe Flash browser plugin, not everyone may be familiar with the Flex environment for building Flash (and other!) applications.

What Is Apache Flex?

Apache FlexÂ® is the open-source framework for building expressive web and mobile applications.

In other words, Flex is a toolkit for building general applications that can be run on a variety of web browsers and mobile platforms that include the Adobe Flash or Adobe AIR runtimes or application containers. Flex is the coding language and environment you use to write applications for the Flash/AIR containers.

No, Really, What Is Apache Flex For?

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What is Apache HBase? Website Branding Review

Website Brand Review of Apache HBase

How do open source projects get popular? By providing some useful functionality that users want to have. How do open source projects thrive over the long term? By turning those users into contributors who then help improve and maintain the project. How well a project showcases themselves on the web is an important part of the adoption and growth cycle.

Here’s my quick review of the Apache HBase project, told purely from the point of view of a new user finding the project website. HBase is a key part of the big data storage stack, so although you may not work directly with it, it’s probably underlying some systems you use.

What Is Apache HBase?

“Apache HBase™ is the Hadoop® database, a distributed, scalable, big data store”.

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What Is Apache Mesos? Website Branding Review

Website Brand Review of Apache Mesos

Here’s my quick review of the Apache Mesos project, told purely from the point of view of a new user finding the project website. Mesos is turning into a majorÂ project in the big data and cloud space; not perhaps the obvious popularity of Apache Spark yet, but certainly big.

What Is Apache Mesos?

Apache Mesos abstracts CPU, memory, storage, and other compute resources away from machines (physical or virtual), enabling fault-tolerant and elastic distributed systems to easily be built and run effectively.

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Apache CMS: Adding static data tables easily?

Did you know that the ASF has their own CMS / static generator / magic update system that runs the apache.org homepage and many Apache project homepages? While it’s more of an Apache infra tool rather than a full Apache top level project, it’s still a full service solution for allowing multiple static website builds that are integrated into our servers.

While there are plenty of great technical CMS systems, when choosing a system for your company, many of the questions are organizational and deployment related. How easy is it for your IT team to manage the core system? How easy is it for various teams (or projects) to store and update their own content, perhaps using different templates in the system? How can you support anonymous editing/patch submission from non-committers? Does it support a safe and processor-respectful static workflow, minimizing the load on production servers while maximizing backups? And how can you do all this with a permissive license, and only hosting your own work?

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What Is Apache Spark? Website Branding Review

Volunteering at the ASF and elsewhere in open source, I think a lot about open source brands. In particular: how do various open source projects – run by a wide variety of typically very geeky volunteers – present themselves publicly to new users? We sometimes spend so much time working on the great new code – and explaining it to other developers we already know – that sometimes I wonder if we’re really showcasing what our great new code can do for new users and contributors.

Here’s my quick review of the Apache Spark project, told purely from the point of view of a new user who just came to the project website. I’m trying to show what I think someone new to the project might think about the project once they get to the homepage. Since Spark is a major project in the big data space, there are a lot of search hits for Spark, including a wide variety of other software vendors.

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