SugarForge.org hit a major milestone last week when the 500th project was registered on the site by Kenneth Thorman with the Open Office SugarCrm plugin project. Brilliant!

It is times like this when it is fun to step back and reflect on the amazing momentum of the SugarCRM community. Can you believe that SugarForge.org is only three years old? I remember in late 2004, early 2005 when the community was asking for a collaboration site where they could focus on just SugarCRM. We really wanted to get the synergy of the Sugar developers focused around one site dedicated to the Sugar community. And so SugarForge.org was launched in March 2005.

Since then, the SugarForge site and the Sugar community have taken off. Not only does SugarForge.org now have 500 projects, but is also coming up on 13,500 registered developers and 4.5 million downloads in the next few weeks. With millions of web page views every month, SugarForge has truly become the focal point of open source CRM development.

So what has happened on SugarForge.org in these past three years?

• 78.1 million web pages viewed
• 4.38 million files downloads
• 13,487 developers registered
• 3,128 different files served

Now that is open source redefining CRM software.

I just got back from IBM’s Impact 2008 show. This show was a pretty amazing whirlwind tour with a primary focus around SOA. It took place in the MGM Grand hotel in Vegas. I was amazed at the size of the MGM Grand property. The conference spanned multiple buildings and I would say at least a square mile of territory.

The conference spanned most of the buildings in the picture on the right. Many of the meetings were in the larger buildings that are relatively close. An Un-Conference that I participated in was in the second signature tower. The second signature tower is the middle of the three thin tall towers in the middle picture.

One of the highlights of the conference was the announcement of WebSphere sMash. WebSphere sMash is the commercial offering based on the incubator project Project Zero. ProjectZero is an attempt to implement the PHP language on top of a JVM. WebSphere is going to support dynamic languages. The first two dynamic languages that they are going to support are PHP and Groovy. With this project, you can code your application in PHP, Groovy, C, and Java. All four of these languages will run in the same process space making calls between the different languages very easy. They have also included some great tooling. They have an IDE in Eclipse and an IDE in the web browser. They have also been leveraging their own technologies in the development of the project. They have PHPBB running on the project zero site in WebSphere sMash.

I also had the opportunity to sit down with Jerry Cuomo the CTO and IBM Fellow in charge of this project and record a podcast that is available on IBM’s DeveloperWorks site. At this point, they have two software packages running on sMash: PHPBB and SugarCRM. The instructions for installing and configuring Sugar for sMash are still being refined. There is also a 10 minute video of Sugar on Zero being extended to span multiple languages and leveraging a SOAP to REST API conversion layer.

This project started about 10 months ago and is still getting refined rapidly. At this point it is capable of running Sugar pretty well. It is also setup to create separate Java processes for each application that you are hosting on your machine. Each application has its own set of dependencies and configurations. This allows each application to be setup with the resources that it needs to accomplish its mission independently of any other application on the system. They also have a repository system that allows the distribution of projects complete with custom configurations.

At this point, the current code is implemented in a way to get maximum functionality as quick as possible. a the functionality gets further and further towards completion, I am very interested to see how well the IBM team is able to leverage some of the person centuries IBM has invested in tooling, optimization, monitoring, virtualization, and scalability.

Check out ProjectZero and let me know what you think.

Jacob Taylor

CTO and Co-Founder

One of our top community members, andopes (199 forum posts in the past month!), has documented in detail in the Sugar Wiki how to configure a Linux system with Zend Core to connect to a MS SQL Server database using the FreeTDS library.

Very cool!

In working with IBM on a presentation, the TIOBE Programming Community Index for April 2008 came to my attention.  Here is a quick preview of the top few languages:

It looks like PHP is holding its own as one of the top languages.  The biggest surprise for me was how quickly VB just gained on C++.  VB has been gaining ground for quite some time.  It had the single largest gain.

Jacob Taylor

CTO and Co-Founder

I was reading a PCWorld article today about an Oxford professor Jonathan Zittrain who has written a new book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It . He has taken the position that closed Internet appliances like the iPhone are stifling innovation.

Quote: “Zittrain argues that today’s Internet appliances such as the iPhone and Xbox hamper innovation. That’s because these locked-down devices prohibit the kind of tinkering by end users that made PCs and the Internet such a force of economic, political and artistic change.”

I find this interesting from a couple perspectives.

First, Carolyn Duffy Marsan, the PCWorld journalist who wrote the review, doesn’t speak once about open source. Living inside the Open Source bubble, I am amazed at times when somebody in the technology industry writes a story about the evils of closed technology without immediately praising the virtues of open source software. After all, the very core principal behind open source is to revolt against closed source software that prevents the very innovation that Zittrain fears we will lose. For shame Ms. Marsan! Keep preaching Matt Asay!

Secondly, it’s interesting to see that Zittrain’s concern is so similar to the concern that Richard Stallman expressed when he sponsored the recent update to the GPL open source license, GPLv3, and specifically drafted license language against the closed Tivo appliance. His concern, which he calls “tivoization” was that closed Linux-based appliances like the Tivo DVR both stifled innovation and flew in the face of the intent of open source licenses.

What I am happy to see is that others besides us pocket-protector open source enthusiasts are seeing that the true power of technology and the Internet is in the freedom to innovate. One of my favorite quotes is:

“Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat”

I’m personally not completely convinced that the iPhone, Xboc and Tivo are going to put the brakes on innovation, but I applaud Mr Zittrain and anybody else who points out the virtues of innovation and strive to protect it.

Ok, so I know it’s a bit last-minute, but for those of you who are looking to sharpen your PHP and MySQL skills, there is an online community college course starting this week. It’s taught by Foothill College, one of the local colleges in the Silicon Valley area.

The class is CIS 52N and it’s completely online so you don’t need to be local to take the course, though you will be charged more if you live “out of state” (outside California). You can register for this (or any other) spring quarter course through April 18th.

For more information, or to register for this course, go to Foothill College’s website. Foothill runs classes year around so check out their website (or your own community college) for interesting classes.

I am here today at the Dutch JoomlaDays conference in Utrecht, Netherlands talking Joomla developers about SugarCRM. Great conference with over 200 developers at the event. Kudos to Henk and team for putting on a great show.

I’m listening right now to James Vasile from the Software Freedom talk about building a community and a successful open source project. As an open source lawyer, you would expect him to focus on the open source license as the center of building a community.

Instead his his three building blocks of building a community are:

• Freedom - create community rules that give people the freedom to build, extend and share. While few people typically read an open source license, it is this contract that ensures the freedom.
• Sharing - build an environment where sharing is cool.
• Ecosystem - Focus on growing and invigorating the ecosystem around the software.

I certainly agree with all his points. A couple things I would add are 1) build GREAT software and 2) communicate, communicate, communicate. You only attract people to your community if you build something attractive.  People will only stay if they are working within a community and not yelling into an empty room.

DragonflyMaster, one of our top posters in the Sugar Forums the past several months, has just created a great Wiki article on Building Dynamic Dropdowns. Also called dependent dropdowns, this feature allows you to link two dropdowns together such that the values in the second dropdown are based on the values in the first dropdown.

Great feature!