Concord Consortium Blog - Software

One more request, President Obama: Open source?

nospam@example.com (Chad Dorsey) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 10:05:23 -0500

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.

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

nospam@example.com (Stephen Bannasch) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 17:40:48 -0500

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.

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

Building OpenJDK on Mac OS X 10.5.6

nospam@example.com (Stephen Bannasch) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:17:10 -0500

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