Vecna Service Missions : Open Source Mission

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Service Mission: Open Source Technology

Developing free software for anyone to use, copy & modify

Mission Statement
Support the Open Source Software movement by creating, augmenting and supporting the development of software that is free in two ways: Free of charge, and free of restrictions — i.e. with a license that stipulates that the software can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction.

What's So Great About Open Source Software?
The Open Source Software movement is an offshoot of the Free Software Movement. According to Wikipedia, "Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. Freedom from such restrictions is central to the concept, with the opposite of free software being proprietary software (a distinction unrelated to whether a fee is charged). The usual way for software to be distributed as free software is for the software to be licensed to the recipient with a free software license (or be in the public domain), and the source code of the software to be made available (for a compiled language)."

Examples of Open Source software include GNU Linux, the Apache web server, Mozilla and Firefox web browsers, and the OpenOffice.org office suite.

Vecna Open Source Projects
Vecna has created several Open Source software projects of its own, and continues to develop more. Below are examples, all available for download free of charge at sourceforge.net.

Easel provides a framework for producing basic CRUD web user interfaces automatically from Hibernate annotations and metadata sources similar to the approach taken by Trails and Naked Objects. Easel supplies a generic business/DAO service for general CRUD operations, and a generic JSF backing bean to handle standard CRUD UI operations. Easel's main objectives are to:

Take advantage of persistence layer metadata to minimize field specifications
Minimize effort to add an additional field to an existing CRUD form
Decouple presentation framework from back-end

To find out more about Easel visit its host site at easel.sourceforge.net. To participate or contribute to this project please contact Scott Miller at smiller@vecna.com or by calling 301-864-7253.

XSnapshot is a framework for generating data transfer classes (which we call snapshot classes) based on domain model classes. Based on XDoclet markup, XSnapshot will generate snapshot classes and helper classes to convert between snapshots and models.

To find out more visit the official XSnapshot site at xsnapshot.sourceforge.net. To participate or contribute to this project please contact Dan Kokotov at dkokotov@vecna.com or by calling 301-864-7253.