TIPS TO DEVELOP OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE

Developing software on an open source stack

This tip is written for all software developers interested in adopting Linux as a development platform and who want to explore the expansive variety of software development tools available for free as open source.

Web developers are enjoying a renaissance. After spending much of the previous decade toiling on server-centric code, programmers are now putting code front-and-center, turning the Web browser into its own computing platform.
Much of the renaissance must be attributed to ingenuity. The newest generation of tools and application frameworks automate and simplify the drudgery of building, deploying, and maintaining a Web site. There are also more tools than ever, and all the most innovative tools are open source. This tutorial provides an expansive survey of the free software available to developers to create and deploy Web applications.
This tutorial describes the wide variety of programming tools available on Linux. Further, it demonstrates how quick and easy it is to start developing on the platform and showcases some of the latest innovations in open source tools.
Objectives:
* Learn how to install a Web server, a database, and several programming languages on Linux.
* Learn how to combine the above pieces to build an application, first in PHP, then in Ruby on Rails.

Prerequisites:
This tutorial is written for all software developers interested in adopting Linux as a development platform and for developers who want to explore the expansive variety of software development tools available for free as open source. To follow this tutorial, you should have a general familiarity with using a Linux command-line shell and some programming experience. Some experience installing and configuring software on Linux is helpful, but not required.

System requirements:

To run the examples in this tutorial, you need a Linux box with at least 300 MB of free disk space. Root access to the machine is required to install a number of the software packages. The examples shown in this tutorial were created on Ubuntu Desktop Linux 8.04.1 running as a virtual machine in Parallels on Mac OS X Leopard. Ubuntu is not required; however, the examples use Aptitude, which can be found in any Debian-based distribution.