14 DAY TRIAL // Last Friday marked an important addition to the suite of websites dedicated to hosting open source projects, as Sun's Project Kenai was made available, and is now ready for use. The thing is, although anyone is free to visit, in order to start a project you need an invitation – and there are plenty of them to go around for now.
There are important, well-established developer hubs available nowadays (GoogleCode, GitHub and Sourceforge, to name just a few), but this one shows great potential of becoming just as popular. As for the obvious competition that will most certainly arise, Project Kenai's leaders state that this is not the purpose of their website, although it will certainly turn out to be a reality.
"Kenai is a recognition by Sun that, as the largest open source company in the world, we need to take control of our own destiny. We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control," said Nick Sieger, the lead developer and ringleader for the project's architecture. "We need to demonstrate credibility in building on top of more traditional LAMP/SAMP web stacks (not just Java EE); and we need to show viability of Sun technologies and hardware for next-generation web applications."
Project Kenai (pronounced "Keen eye") is basically a Rails application running JRuby over an Apache server (using mod_proxy_balancer) with a single MySQL database. Other features like Python, Perl are used to integrate Subversion, Mercurial, Bugzilla and Sympa (a mailing list software).
It's a new project, still in development stage, which is why it's expected to evolve, becoming more and more suited to meet users' expectations.
Here is what Nick Sieger had to say about the future plans of the Kenai Project, "By launching, I think we’re well on the way toward showing progress toward those goals. Where we go from here is going to be a blend of what the community asks of us and our own ideas for what we think would be cool new features to build on top of a collaboration portal that no one else has done yet. In the near term, we want to beef up the feature set to make it more usable for daily development by students and open source projects. We want to add a files facility to host project binaries and downloads. We want to add JIRA as an issue tracking option and Git as an SCM option. An incremental refresh of the site navigation and layout is also in progress."