Languages

Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of higher quality, more maintainable code.

Python Based Technologies and Frameworks

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design. Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly. Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure. Pinax is an open-source platform built on the Django Web Framework. By integrating numerous reusable Django apps to take care of the things that many sites have in common, it lets you focus on what makes your site different. Google App Engine enables you to build and host web apps on the same systems that power Google applications. App Engine offers fast development and deployment; simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups; and effortless scalability Jinja2 is a modern and designer friendly templating language for Python, modelled after Django’s templates. It is fast, widely used and secure with the optional sandboxed template execution environment. It provides a Django-like non-XML syntax and compiles templates into executable python code. It's basically a combination of Django templates and python code. Werkzeug is a WSGI utility library for Python. It was developed out of the wish to have a library that combines often used WSGI utilities and other web development specific helpers without creating a full featured framework that includes a template engine or something like that. Flask is a microframework for Python based on Werkzeug, Jinja 2 and good intentions. It is a lightweight web application framework written in Python and based on the Werkzeug WSGI toolkit and Jinja2 template engine. Flask is called a “microframework” because it keeps the core simple but extensible. There is no database abstraction layer, no form validation or anything else where different libraries already exist that can handle that. Twisted is an event-driven networking engine written in Python. Twisted projects variously support TCP, UDP, SSL/TLS, IP Multicast, Unix domain sockets, a large number of protocols (including HTTP, XMPP, NNTP, IMAP, SSH, IRC, FTP, and others), and much more. Twisted is based on the event-driven programming paradigm, which means that users of Twisted write short callbacks which are called by the framework. TurboGears is a Python web application framework consisting of several WSGI components. TurboGears is designed around the model-view-controller architecture, much like Struts or Ruby on Rails, designed to make rapid web application development in Python easier and more maintainable. Django CMS is a free and open source content management system platform for publishing content on the W3C. It is based on Django (web framework), and written in Python.

Client Side Technologies

HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard, currently under development. Like its immediate predecessors, HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, HTML5 is a standard for structuring and presenting content on the W3C. HTML5 is a response to the observation that the HTML and XHTML in common use on the World Wide Web is a mixture of features introduced by various specifications, along with those introduced by software products such as web browsers, those established by common practice, together with many syntax errors in existing web documents. CSS is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. CSS3 delivers a wide range of stylization and effects, enhancing the web app without sacrificing your semantic structure or performance. Additionally Web Open Font Format (WOFF) provides typographic flexibility and control far beyond anything the web has offered before. JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. JavaScript is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as part of a web browser in order to provide enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites. However, its use in applications outside web pages—for example in PDF-documents, site-specific browsers and desktop widgets—is also significant. jQuery is a new kind of JavaScript Library. It is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. Ajax is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create interactive web applications. With Ajax, web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). XML's design goals emphasize simplicity, generality, and usability over the Internet. It is a textual data format with strong support via Unicode for the languages of the world. Although the design of XML focuses on documents, it is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures, for example in web services.

DBMS

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems, including Linux, UNIX (AIX, BSD, HP-UX, SGI IRIX, Mac OS X, Solaris, Tru64), and Windows. MySQL is the world's most popular open source database. With its superior speed, reliability, and ease of use, MySQL has become the preferred choice for Web, Web 2.0, SaaS, ISV, Telecom companies and forward-thinking corporate IT Managers because it eliminates the major problems associated with downtime, maintenance and administration for modern, online applications. Amazon SimpleDB is a highly available, scalable, and flexible non-relational data store that offloads the work of database administration. Developers simply store and query data items via web services requests, and Amazon SimpleDB does the rest.

NoSQL

MongoDB is a scalable, high-performance, open source, schema-free, document-oriented database. MongoDB bridges the gap between key-value stores (which are fast and highly scalable) and traditional RDBMS systems (which provide structured schemas and powerful queries). CouchDB is a document-oriented database that can be queried and indexed in a MapReduce fashion using JavaScript. CouchDB also offers incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution. CouchDB provides a RESTful JSON API than can be accessed from any environment that allows HTTP requests. There are myriad third-party client libraries that make this even easier from your programming language of choice.

Key-value Storage

RedisRedis is an open source, advanced key-value store. It is often referred to as a data structure server since keys can contain strings, hashes, lists, sets and sorted sets. User can run atomic operations on these types, like appending to a string; incrementing the value in a hash; pushing to a list; computing set intersection, union and difference; or getting the member with highest ranking in a sorted set. Membase is a distributed key-value database management system, optimized for storing data behind interactive web applications. Membase automatically spreads data and I/O across servers. This "scale out" approach at the data layer permits virtually unlimited growth of transaction capacity, with linear increases in cost and constant per-operation performance. Riak is an open source scalable data store: because building scalable, fault-tolerant, and highly-available applications should be simple and inexpensive. Free & open source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, generic in nature, but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering.

API

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, post links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet. Twitter is a real-time information network that connects you to the latest information about what you find interesting. Simply find the public streams you find most compelling and follow the conversations. Google Maps is a web mapping service application and technology provided by Google. It offers street maps, a route planner for traveling by foot, car, or public transport and an urban business locator for numerous countries around the world. Google Maps satellite images are not in real time; they are several months or years old. Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos and videos to the world, securely and privately show content to your friends and family, or blog the photos and videos you take with a cameraphone. LinkedIn strengthens and extends your existing network of trusted contacts. LinkedIn is a networking tool that helps you discover inside connections to recommended job candidates, industry experts and business partners. PayPal is the faster, safer way to send money, make an online payment, receive money or set up a merchant account. Twilio provides infrastructure APIs for businesses to build scalable, reliable voice and text messaging apps.

Search Engines

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites. Sphinx is an open source full text search server, designed from the ground up with performance, relevance (aka search quality), and integration simplicity in mind. It's written in C++ and works on Linux (RedHat, Ubuntu, etc), Windows, MacOS, Solaris, FreeBSD, and a few other systems.

Clustering/Performance/Server Side

Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers a set of services that together form a reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform “in the cloud”. The Rackspace Cloud is a web application hosting/cloud platform provider that bills on a utility computing basis. It has since branched out into cloud storage and cloud infrastructure and is "already a real leader in the cloud" according to analyst Signal Hill. HAProxy is the reliable, high performance tcp/http load balancer Varnish is a web accelerator written with performance and flexibility in mind. It's modern architecture gives it a significantly better performance than many of it's competing products. Varnish store web pages in memory so the web servers don't have to create the same web page over and over again. The web server only recreate a page when it is changed. Additionally Varnish can serve web pages much faster then any application server is capable of - giving the website a significant speed up. Nginx is a HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server. It has been running for more than five years on many heavily loaded Russian sites including Rambler. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 4.70% busiest sites in April 2010. The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache, is web server software notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the W3C. In 2009 it became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million web site milestone. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently known as Oracle iPlanet Web Server), and has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance. The majority of web servers using Apache run a Unix-like operating system. Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well. Fabric is a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

Version Control System

Mercurial is a free, distributed source control management tool. It efficiently handles projects of any size and offers an easy and intuitive interface. Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Branching and merging are fast and easy to do. Bazaar is a version control system that helps you track project history over time and to collaborate easily with others. Whether you're a single developer, a co-located team or a community of developers scattered across the world, Bazaar scales and adapts to meet your needs. Part of the GNU Project, Bazaar is free software sponsored by Canonical.

Collaboration Tools

JIRA provides issue tracking and project tracking for software development teams to improve code quality and the speed of development. Combining a clean, fast interface for capturing and organising issues with customisable workflows, OpenSocial dashboards and a pluggable integration framework, JIRA is the perfect fit at the centre of your development team. Redmine is a flexible project management web application. Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database. Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project management and collaboration tool. To-dos, files, messages, schedules, and milestones. Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission is to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team's established development process and policies. GitHub is the best way to collaborate with others. Fork, send pull requests and manage all your public and private git repositories Bitbucket is a free code hosting site for Subversion (SVN) and Mercurial. Manage your development with a hosted wiki, issue tracker and source code. It enables more powerful collaboration with your team. Commit locally (whether on-line and off), branch and merge with ease, and monitor the activity in your source tree.

Geo System/Services

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. OpenLayers has been developed to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript. The GIS branch intends to be a world-class geographic web framework. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to build GIS web applications and harness the power of spatially enabled data. PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS), much like ESRI's SDE or Oracle's Spatial extension. PostGIS follows the OpenGIS "Simple Features Specification for SQL" and has been certified as compliant with the "Types and Functions" profile. Mapnik is a Free Toolkit for developing mapping applications. It's written in C++ and there are Python bindings to facilitate fast-paced agile development. It can comfortably be used for both desktop and web development, which was something I wanted from the beginning. GeoServer is an open source software server written in Java that allows users to share and edit geospatial data. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using open standards. Being a community-driven project, GeoServer is developed, tested, and supported by a diverse group of individuals and organizations from around the world. MapProxy is an open source proxy for geospatial data. It caches, accelerates and transforms data from existing map services and serves any desktop or web GIS client. MapProxy works like a simple tile cache, but also offers many new and innovative features like full support for WMS clients. TileCache provides a Python-based WMS-C/TMS server, with pluggable caching mechanisms and rendering backends. In the simplest use case, TileCache requires only write access to a disk, the ability to run Python CGI scripts, and a WMS you want to be cached. With these resources, you can create your own local disk-based cache of any WMS server, and use the result in any WMS-C supporting client, like OpenLayers, or any TMS supporting client, like OpenLayers and worldKit. GeoJSON is a format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures. A GeoJSON object may represent a geometry, a feature, or a collection of features. GeoJSON supports the following geometry types: Point, LineString, Polygon, MultiPoint, MultiLineString, MultiPolygon, and GeometryCollection. Features in GeoJSON contain a geometry object and additional properties, and a feature collection represents a list of features. Tile Map Service (TMS) is a specification for storing and retrieving cartographic data, developed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The definition generally requires a URI structure which attempts to fulfill REST principles. The TMS protocol fills a gap between the simplistic standard used by OpenStreetMap and the complexity of the Web Map Service standard, providing simple urls to tiles while also supporting alternate spatial referencing system. A Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) is an XML schema specified by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) for describing the appearance of map layers. It is capable of describing the rendering of vector and raster data. A typical use of SLDs is to instruct a Web Map Service (WMS) of how to render a specific layer. Web Feature Service Interface Standard (WFS) provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map, whereas the WMS interface or online mapping portals like Google Maps return only an image, which end-users cannot edit or spatially analyze. The XML-based GML furnishes the default payload-encoding for transporting the geographic features, but other formats like shapefiles can also serve for transport.

Operation Systems

Linux refers to the family of Unix-like computer operating systems using the Linux kernel. Linux can be installed on a wide variety of computer hardware, ranging from mobile phones, tablet computers and video game consoles, to mainframes and supercomputers. Linux is a leading server operating system, and runs the 10 fastest supercomputers in the world. Mac OS is a series of graphical user interface-based operating systems developed by Apple Inc. for their Macintosh line of computer systems. The Macintosh user experience is credited with popularizing the graphical user interface. The original form of what Apple would later name the "Mac OS" was the integral and unnamed system software first introduced in 1984 with the original Macintosh, usually referred to simply as the System software. FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for modern server, desktop, and embedded computer platforms. FreeBSD's code base has undergone over thirty years of continuous development, improvement, and optimization. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. FreeBSD provides advanced networking, impressive security features, and world class performance and is used by some of the world's busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.