It’s the 25th edition of Rebase! If you’re feeling nostalgic and want to dive through the previous issues, check out the archive here.

Featured Project

pinax is a Django-based platform for building awesome web applications quickly. This combination of reusable apps and strong conventions can help get your site off the ground in no time. Nicholas Tollervey puts it best in this blog post:

In our analogy, Django is Lego bricks: it gives you the building blocks you need to build interesting things on the web. […] Pinax is a collection of Lego sets: it gives you a set of off-the-shelf components commonly used in web-development: a wiki, OpenID, Twitter clone and so on

Pinax is packed with plenty of features, not to mention a decent set of docs. Check it out in action on Cloud27, a social networking site built just to show off its features, and definitely check out this talk from DjangoCon 2008 about the framework.

Notably New Projects

data-baby-names is a quick study using R and Ruby to produce some neat graphs about the top 1000 baby names from 1880 to present day. For stats nuts or perhaps new parents, this could be an interesting diversion from your normal routine.

merle isn’t exactly new, but it is sure is notable! This Erlang based memcached client is the slickest way to interface with everyone’s favorite object caching system. If you’re writing a serious web app with Erlang, chances are it’s going to need something as high performance solid as memcached, so save yourself some frustration and check out this first. Read up or peruse the docs if you find yourself needing to integrate some caching in your applicaiton.

weary souls need REST, according to this library. Think of weary as the after-HTTParty. The DSL for declaring a HTTP resource is extremely clean, and it’s really simple to dive down and tinker with the details if necessary. This gem also uses Crack to parse json and xml that your webservice du jour provides.

sykobot is an IRC bot from another universe. No really, it’s a bot for #archlinux on Freenode, and it’s got google search, quoting, and plenty of more fun goodies implemented already. The bot is written in Lisp, and it’s already got several active contributors even though it’s only been around for nearly 2 weeks. Get forking!

CssMerger is a C# app that allows you to develop CSS in separate files so some cohesion and sanity can be kept while designing your site, and then serves up a single file once deployed. Basically, it works by replacing import directives with your desired CSS file. If you’re using ASP.NET you should definitely take a look into how this can help you.

The BBC has open sourced Glow, their internally developed JavaScript library.

Check out What is Glow? for their FAQ or just grab the source right here on GitHub:

http://github.com/glow/glow1

Jason Meridth has produced a follow up to his excellent Git for Windows blog post. The newest blog post details sign up, creating a repository, pushing, branching, status – all the good stuff!

Be sure to check it out.

Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 2

Less than a year and half after our public launch, GitHub surpassed 100k users last night. Thanks to all for signing up, here’s a simple graph I whipped up courtesy of topfunky’s gruff library.

Thanks to everyone who came out!

I asked those present to share an open source project of theirs. Here are a few:

• simple_gate – A Ruby library for using net/ssh/gateway’s capabilities in a simple to use way.
• surf – A simple CouchDB mapper written in Scala
• ubuntu-machine – Capistrano recipes which allow you to setup a machine running Ubuntu Server 8.0.4 or 8.1.
• active_record_like – Make your ActiveRecords come from XML, LDAP, Memcache or even C# libraries!
• ico – A JavaScript graph library based on Raphael by Wakoopa.

Show us yours!

I’m in Amsterdam for Kings of Code (which was awesome) and will be at Cafe de Jaren Thursday (the 2nd) at 8pm.

Stop by and have a drink if you’re in the neighborhood!

Not sure who to look for? Check the BusinessWeek photo (I’m on the right).

Welcome back to Rebase! Want your project featured? Check out the guidelines and remember: the more information on your README/project page the better!

Featured Project

blue-ridge is a no-hassle JavaScript testing framework. Built on the same principles as Rails such as Convention over Configuration, this combines the power of Rhino, Screw.Unit, Smoke, and env.js so you can test the core logic behind your JS without having to deal with a browser. This is built right into your Rails testing framework of choice, and it even has an interactive console so you can debug your code instead of using a tool like Firebug. By default it assumes you’re using jQuery, but Prototype can be swapped in with barely any effort. Check out this great blog post to see how to get started, and browse around a sample application to see it in action.

Notably New Projects

PNGSquash is for those who love OSX apps and smaller images. Save some bandwidth and some frustration by allowing this app to crush your PNGs for you. Pick from your favorite algorithm for shaving bytes off images such as PNGCrush or OptiPNG to literally squash those bits down. Download the app here if you’d like to try it out.

loli is a Haskell web development DSL inspired by Sinatra that can run on Hack (which is based on Rack). This is a neat way to express a web application that’s both classy and extremely functional. It’s already got some great view template support, including Rails-inspired partials and layouts.

v8-gl fuses the ubiquitious graphics engine, OpenGL, with the speed demon of a JavaScript interpreter, v8. The result is that you can code graphical apps in JS instead of C/C++. This project aims to be a full toolkit, but right now it’s just getting the bindings down so everything is possible in pure JS. The progress so far looks pretty stunning, and I’m sure this project could use your help if you’re of the graphical/gaming type.

bananajour is a wacky name for a slick interface to Git repositories served up over Bonjour. Think of this like gitjour, but with a really nice web application on top of it. Why is this useful? Well, if you happen to be attending certain gatherings without internet access, this is a great way to share your code. If you can’t connect to GitHub, this looks like your best option to get your Git on.

Palette is little Python project that uses the Python Imaging Library to create a color map of any picture. The most interesting visualization it can create is a ‘star’ color wheel, where the length of the ray is proportional to the hue. Here’s what it looks like for our dear friend the Octocat. This could be a neat little project to hack on if you’re new to Python and would like something a bit visual to hack on.

Yesterday you pushed 17,160 times to GitHub for a total of 44,287 unique commits.

You also pushed an additional 9,577 non-unique commits.

Thanks.

hivelogic has a great, in-depth tutorial on Deploying ExpressionEngine from GitHub with Capistrano.

Thanks Dan!

Inspired by the Merb Internals Handbook, the Grails community has begun working on a handbook of their own: The Grails Internals Handbook.

From the README:

If you want to contribute, fork this repository and go ahead. Pull requests on GitHub are more than welcome. If you use patches, make sure you use git format-patch and your patch has author name and email address on it.

We love to see this stuff – keep ’em coming, and good luck!

If you’re in New York, or are interested in Open Government initiatives, you may be excited to know that the New York State Senate has opened up to the online community in a big way. They have put up a Free and Open-Source Software & Services website that provides and documents an API for all of their legislative data, feeds and widgets for that data, a browser for that data that even uses Disqus to allow you to comment on legislation, and open source software projects that help consume that data.

The cool thing for us is that they’ve put all their open source projects up on GitHub at github.com/nysenatecio for you to use and improve.

As a user of Open-Source software the New York Senate wants to help give back to the community that has given it so much – including this website. To meet its needs the Senate is constantly developing new code and fixing existing bugs. Not only does the Senate recognize that it has a responsibility to give back to the Open Source community, but public developments, made with public money should be public.

We are very happy that we can help them share these projects, and I hope more local and federal government efforts will open up to this degree. Congratulations to the New York Senate for moving forward with openness and accountability.

Great blog post. Useful whether you’re on Unix or Windows.

Using GitHub Through Draconian Proxies

Thanks Jeff! (And sorry you’re stuck behind a proxy :)

If so, dinoboff has you covered! github-tools includes a “PasteScript template, Paver tasks and Sphinx extension to setup a new package and easily host it on GitHub (including its documentation)”.

Get it from pypi

easy_install github-tools

Or GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/dinoboff/github-tools.git
cd github-tools
python setup.py install

Thanks dinoboff!

It’s Rebase time once again!

Featured Project

clojure is a functional programming language based on Lisp that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. It recently hit a pretty huge milestone and is now freely available for you to fork right here on GitHub. There’s quite a few screencasts about using the language over at blip.tv along with plenty of documentation at their homepage. Want to see Clojure in action? Try out ring or compojure, both web frameworks, or incanter, a statistical computing and graphics environment. If you’re into functional programming and want to harness its power on the JVM, give this language a look.

Notably New Projects

hemlock is a new ActionScript based framework that combines the powers of Flash and XMPP through ejabberd to create some killer web applications. (I know, that pun was terrible.) There’s plenty of examples already on their site, and make sure to peruse their Learn page to see how this all comes together.

rip is a brand new packaging system for Ruby that provides a ridiculously useful alternative to those used to dealing with RubyGems. Armed with the ability to install packages from multiple sources, the sharing of virtual environments, dependency checking at install time instead of at runtime and more, this library is definitely going to change the game for those doing serious Ruby work. The project’s readme and homepage has plenty of information, and be sure to check out some of the various blog posts about it.

django-haystack is the latest and greatest search plugin for the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines. Hook it up to Solr, Whoosh or Xapian and get searching. With an API that claims to make any Djangonaut feel right at home, you’re sure to save some time looking through your site’s data if you check out this project first.

ginatra mixes together everyone’s favorite source code management system with Sinatra to produce one classy looking gitweb clone. Don’t take my word for it though, check it out for yourself. If you’re the type that likes to view your git history locally in your browser, set aside some time to get this working for your repositories and you won’t be let down.

tictactoe-scala is pretty self-explanatory, but could be a fun start for those willing to take a look at Scala for its incredible scaling power or even those who want to have a website that can handle over 5000 requests per minute. I tend to learn more by reading a game’s code than a queueing system or web server, and I’m hoping you will too.