MS releases Web development suite

Software developer Microsoft has packaged up open source software to create a Web development toolkit, according to TheInquirer.net.

Microsoft's Webmatrix development kit is pitched at Web developers of all types, and claims to allow easy access to presently available software and Web hosting providers. Of particular surprise is Microsoft's decision to promote open source software packages within Webmatrix, including the popular Wordpress and Joomla content management systems.

Around 40 open source applications make up Microsoft's renewed effort in producing Web publishing software. While software such as Wordpress does not directly compete with any Microsoft product, it is pushing PHP, which goes up against its own Active Server Pages software. There are search engine optimisation tools included and even help for those looking for a Web hosting company.

An Internet infrastructure outfit based in Atlanta, Georgia, has unveiled a public storage service based on OpenStack, becoming the first organisation outside of Rackspace and Nasa to actually deploy the open source 'infrastructure cloud' platform, says The Register.

Known as Internap XIPCloud Storage, the service is still in beta, but the company expects it will be available to the general public after a “very short" testing period. "This is the first service provider who's deploying OpenStack and building an offering around it," says Jonathan Bryce, chairman of the OpenStack project oversight committee and co-founder of the Rackspace Cloud.

Rackspace and Nasa unveiled OpenStack six months ago, and according to Bryce, the project now boasts over 40 partners, including Dell, Japanese telecom giant NTT, and Microsoft. The project is based on Nova, a compute engine and fabric controller designed by Nasa, and Swift, an object storage platform originally built by Rackspace.

Foursquare has released two open source development tools on GitHub, writes Information Week.

The popular location service posted the code for Rogue, a MongoDB query domain-specific language (DSL) written in Scala, said company co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, in a tweet. Almost simultaneously, Foursquare released Fully-Loaded, a caching image loader for iOS, he tweeted.

On GitHub, Fully-Loaded is described as "a highly opinionated image loader and cache optimised for UITableView scrolling performance." For its part, Rogue is a type-safe internal Scala DSL for building and executing find-and-modify commands against MongoDB in the Lift Web framework, according to Foursquare.