Wednesday, February 11. 2009

One more request, President Obama: Open source?

Software
It looks as if our open letter to President Obama
 isn't alone. A recent post on Ars Technica kindly points us to another open letter from a group of open source vendors and advocates calling for the new administration to consider open source software in government IT initiatives and infrastructure.

Of course, we've been thinking about open source software's power and potential in education for quite a while. Our recently described vision for educational technology depends vitally upon open source materials and the value of community input. That's why we release our software as open source and invite you to visit our source code library to download any or all of it, examine it for yourself and – we hope – submit your own ideas, suggestions or improvements.
Posted by Chad Dorsey in Software at 10:05
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Wednesday, February 4. 2009

Comparison of Ruby 1.8.6 1.9 and JRuby running on Java 1.5 1.6 and 1.7

Software

Ruby is a powerful and dynamic open-source object-oriented language we have been using extensively at CC in the last few years for the web applications that manage and coordinate authoring and deployment of activities based on the SAIL/OTrunk framework .

The standard Ruby VM is written in C and we've been using version 1.8.6, the latest stable release on our servers. A beta version of the next major release, version 1.9.1 has recently been released.

Ruby 1.9 looks to be about twice as fast as Ruby 1.8.6.

I'm even more impressed by the recent performance increases in JRuby however. This is a version of Ruby that runs in Java. Programs written in JRuby can easily access code written in Java which makes integration with the rest of our Java codebase much easier.

A year ago programs written in JRuby were often slower than ones written in version 1.8.6 of C Ruby. Now for some benchmarks JRuby is twice as fast as Ruby 1.9.

Ruby Merge Sort Speed Comparison

More details about some of these measurements are here: 

Ruby 1.8.6, 1.9, and JRuby running on Java 1.5, 1.6, and 1.7 compared

 


 

 

Posted by Stephen Bannasch in Software at 17:40 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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Tuesday, February 3. 2009

Opening the conversation

Welcome back.

As we at the Concord Consortium begin to make more regular posts to our blog, I'm not exactly certain whom I'm welcoming back more: you as our readers, or ourselves as bloggers. Either way, we're pleased to have you as part of the conversation.

And we have plenty to talk about, as our most recent version of @Concord shows. Whether we're giving advice to President Obama, imagining a world beyond textbooks, or giving you free online lessons to use next Monday, we're interested in asking good questions about what technology can do for education. And as a new face around our halls, I'm personally thrilled to be a part of it all.

But, frankly, a conversation gets pretty boring with only one side, so we're interested in hearing your thoughts as well. We hope you'll bring your perspectives to our posts, tell us about software you love or want improved, and share your vision of how technology can help students learn better.

So welcome back. And stop back often, to help us turn good thoughts into a great dialogue.

Posted by Chad Dorsey at 17:54 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)
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Monday, February 2. 2009

Building OpenJDK on Mac OS X 10.5.6

Software

The next version of Java being developed is v1.7.0 and the OpenJDK version is being released as open source under the GPL license.

 I've written a wiki page describing how to build and install this new version of Java on Mac OS 10.5.6.

Build OpenJDK Java 1.7.0 on Mac OS X 10.5

 

Posted by Stephen Bannasch in Software at 15:17 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)
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