OStatic

The SIMILE Widgets project has four nifty tools for Web developers who want to provide data visualization or to create exhibits from pictures, with minimal coding required.

The Timeline widget can be used to create a scrolling timeline to help visualize event or other temporal data. Timeline can be used for historical visualizations, such as the JFK Assassination timeline and life of Monet, or might be used by a project to visualize the development roadmap. Users interact with the timeline with their mouse scrollwheel or just by dragging the timeline. Each point on the timeline can contain further details that are displayed in a overlay pop-up.

Despite the fact that open source software is often criticized for offering too many choices, it's safe to say that people like to have options. This doesn't pertain solely to end-users -- developers, designers, and quality assurance professionals all have their personal preferences when it comes to development framework and languages.

That's where it tends to get complicated. Selenium Remote Control is an open source cross-browser, cross-platform functional testing framework. However, it's a testing tool geared primarily toward developers with automated functional testing and continuous integration processes in place. Installing, configuring and maintaining the Selenium framework takes precious resources away from application development and testing.

Today, Sauce Labs released its Sauce RC (Remote Control) 1.0 utility. It's a simple web interface enabling QA professionals and harried developers to easily configure, administer, and test their applications on Selenium.

JavaScript programmers, rejoice! It's been a good week for open source from big companies. Earlier this week Yahoo! released its Traffic Server it acquired from Inktomi, and now Google has unleashed Closure Tools. These are part of the toolset that Google uses to create JavaScript-heavy applications like Google Docs, Gmail, and Google Maps.

We've done several posts on how open source skills can arm job seekers with valuable differentiation from the rest of the pack, and lots of support for that concept continues to arrive. From working for commercial open source companies to working on open source-focused divisions at big companies such as Google, skills with tools such as PHP, Hadoop, and open source content management system platforms can be really valuable in today's tough job market.

In this post, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert took note of the very favorable trends in the job market for people with Drupal skills. In Elance?s Online Work Index, which analyzes the hot categories for tech jobs posted on its online marketplace, PHP-related jobs held the number one spot in July (as has been true since February). Now, Black Duck software, which maintains a large knowledgebase of trends in open source usage, is out with some notable statistics about which programming languages are showing momentum in open source projects, and how they're being influenced by growth in web applications.

If you've got a great Web site and want to give visitors a nudge about which parts they shouldn't miss, have a look at Amberjack. It's a handy open source widget that acts as a tour guide for your site.

There's no need to spend hours creating screencasts or hassling with screenshots, just open the wizard and add the URLs of the pages you want highlighted. Amberjack generates HTML code you can drop right into your site.

Microsoft to present open source blueprint for down economy. The company plans to use this week's Open Source Business Conference to outline its next moves.

From open source software to open culture: three misunderstandings. Open processes won't automatically uncover weaknesses and errors.

12 of the best free Linux instant messaging clients. From Pidgin to Psi.

The JavaScript trap. You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it?through your web browser.

Arduino hardware hacking--part one. The tiny device that comes with a USB port and programmable chip lets you roll your own devices.

Dojo, one of the leading open-source libraries and widget sets for JavaScript programming, released its latest version (1.2) yesterday. Dojo, which is developed by the Dojo Foundation and released under both the BSD License and Academic Free License, is officially integrated with a number of Web development frameworks, such as Django and the Zend Framework, and by vendors such as IBM and Sun Microsystems.

Yahoo announced yesterday that it was releasing version 2.6 of its popular Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library, a collection of JavaScript objects and functions for client-side Web programming. YUI, distributed under the BSD license, is similar to such open-source JavaScript libraries as jQuery (see related story), Dojo, and Prototype/Scriptaculous. Note that this release is not the same as YUI 3.0, a preview of which was released earlier this year, and which will not be backward compatible with version 2.x.

jQuery, one of the best-known open-source libraries for JavaScript access and manipulation, was tapped earlier this week as Microsoft's choice for JavaScript library. This means that jQuery will be integrated into Microsoft's Visual Studio developer tools, with additional integration into the ASP.NET Ajax framework. This announcement came on the same day as a similar one from Nokia, which announced that jQuery would be integrated into its Web run-time platform. Announcements were made in a variety of locations, including Rey Blango's blog, and posts by Microsoft programmers Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanelsman. The original author of jQuery, John Resig, wrote a blog post that not only announced the news, but described some of the improvements that will come to jQuery as a result, including additional software testing.