So I’ve decided to expand the database to encompass the other language that I regularly use, java, and publish a database of open source HTTP proxies written in java.

While carrying out a web development project a few years ago, I needed a HTTP proxy to help with development and debugging. Rather than write my own, I decided to research what open source options were already available.

However, Python is such an easy language to write web servers and proxies in that a lot people had written and puiblished HTTP proxies, so making the decision wasn’t easy. It required a lot of research, which basically meant a code and architectural review of all of the open source python proxies available.

Since most web programmers use a HTTP proxy at some stage, I thought it would be a useful exercise to compile a complete list of the available options, with a comparison table to enable a feature by feature comparison.

The result of that was this comparison table of open source HTTP proxies written in python, which became quite popular, because it saved python programmers going through the same complex comparison and review process I had undertaken.

Since I’m currently working on another proxy-related project, I needed to review available open source HTTP proxies written in java. And I thought I’d save someone some research time by publishing a similar comparison table of open source HTTP proxies in java.

I hope you find it useful.

As you may know, JSON is used extensively in modern web development, particularly to communicate data between servers and clients in Rich Internet Applications, or Web 2.0 applications. JSON is commonly the preferred choice for data interchange between clients and servers which use a Respresentational State Transfer (REST) based architecture.

JSON is often the preferred choice because it is a fat free alternative to XML. Although we use XML all the time, we fully recognise that it be both complex to work with and inefficient to generate and parse. JSON, on the other hand, is both simple and fast.

Jyson is written in pure java, and should be highly performant. So, if you’re using jython and JSON, we recommend you check out jyson.

On the portal you will find source code, documentation, issue trackers, etc, for open source software that we have published.

To run our open source portal, we use the excellent Redmine, an open source project management system written with Ruby on Rails. One thing we particularly like is that the Ruby community uses Redmine extensively, meaning that they subscribe to the philosophy of eating their own dog food, an admirable trait in the open source world.

We host our instance of Redmine on jruby, running on Apache Tomcat 6.0.

We chose Redmine because it is a highly functional and well architected piece of software. Browsing the source code for redmine shows that it is well designed and highly extensible, with a range of plugins for different tasks. Moreover, it has a rich feature set, including

• Multiple projects
• Hierarchical projects
• Forums
• Issue trackers
• Wiki
• File and Document areas
• News
• lots of other great features

Many thanks to the Redmine developers for their great software!

Being avid pythonistas, we normally like to use python or jython software when possible. In the case of project management, the obvious choice would be Trac, which was the first software of it’s type in the market, and in many ways defined the space that Redmine occupies.

But Trac has many problems, the most restrictive being that it can only support single projects (unless one is willing to do a fair amount of hacking). Furthermore, the Trac code base is getting a little crufty, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that authors focus on changing the technologies on which Trac is built, rather than on adding new functionality that is useful to the end user.

So we invite you to visit the xhaus.com open source software portal.