XP Days Benelux is a two day international conference about agile software development.  The next edition will happen on November 20 and 21, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

XP Coach Matteo Vaccari will present a workshop about the theory of invariants; don’t be fooled by the word “theory”, it will not be a dreary lesson but a workshop with many fun exercises.  This is the spirit of the XP Days: it’s not a place where you sit and listen, it’s a place where you learn by doing and acting.

As The Netherlands is one of the countries where Sourcesense is present, a number of Sourcesense staff will attend.

Sourcesense Agile mentors Matteo Vaccari, Tommaso Torti and Jacopo Franzoi helped organize the 3rd European Summer School on Agile Programming (Essap) in Varese in the first week of July. ESSAP is a week-long, full immersion course for European students and professionals willing to learn Extreme Programming and Agile principles.

Sourcesense’s trainers contribution has been centered around test-driven development and acceptance testing with Fitnesse. This year’s edition was attended by 28 students, developers and Agile practitioners gathered in Varese for a week full of interactive sessions, tutorials and coaching, not to mention fun and good food.

Sourcesense participation and backing of Essap is yet another step demonstrating our increasing committment towards Agile practices and pragmatic approaches to software development.

Sourcesense is pleased to announce a new training session for the leading Open Source ECM framework.

The next edition of the Alfresco Administration (ALF2110) training course will be in London, April 7th-8th. The course, delivered by certified Alfresco trainers, will combine lectures and hands-on exercises and labs. By attending this training session, interested parties will learn how to properly install, configure, manage and tune an enterprise class Alfresco instance.

A detailed course agenda is available on the Alfresco web site. Please contact alfresco@sourcesense.com for further informations and subscriptions

A number of Sourcesense staff will be attending ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam, April 7th to 11th. Make sure you don’t miss the “Your Open Source strategy sucks!” session by Gianugo Rabellino on April 9th.

Sourcesense, a leading European Open Source systems integration consultancy, today announced Scarlet v.1.0GA, the first freely-available, Open Source enterprise-grade clustering solution for Atlassian JIRA that provides critical server scalability and reliability whilst significantly reducing overhead.

Milan, Italy (PRWEB) April 2, 2008 — Sourcesense, a leading European Open Source systems integration consultancy, today announced Scarlet v.1.0GA, the first freely-available, Open Source enterprise-grade clustering solution for Atlassian JIRA. A pan-European partner of Sourcesense, Atlassian Software provides lightweight collaboration solutions for more than 8,500 customers worldwide, including 30 of the world’s top 50 corporations.

JIRA is the most widely-used project management and issue-tracking solution for distributed team collaboration. A wide variety of organisations spanning Global Fortune 1000 companies, manufacturers, government institutions, consultants, academia, pharmaceutical and scientific research facilities, and technology developers rely on JIRA for innovative ways to work more effectively.

SHARE and Share Alike
Through its SHARE methodology, Sourcesense helps companies introduce, control, and manage Open Source technology across their organization, as well as contribute back to the Open Source community. By providing innovative, enterprise-grade solutions based on Atlassian components, Sourcesense customers can benefit from the company’s extensive expertise in integrating, consolidating, and supporting collaborative environments.

Sourcesense developed Scarlet in response to strong customer demand for optimized collaboration through improved scalability, stability, and reliability. Whilst clustering solutions are an essential component for high-demand server performance, traditional application clustering adds a significant amount of architectural complexity and is often difficult to deploy. Scarlet was built “mashup-style”, using Terracotta DSO (Distributed Shared Objects) for plug-and-play clustering that can be easily deployed across the enterprise, saving hundreds of programming hours. Terracotta Inc. is a Sourcesense partner that offers state-of-the-art application-level transparent clustering solutions to provide distributed computing environments an effective framework to easily scale up new and existing applications.

Scarlet plays a crucial role in high-availability environments, where reduced downtime and improved workflow is an integral element for robust applications, saving both time and money. In keeping with Open Source principles and practices, Sourcesense has made Scarlet source code openly available, distributed under the flexible MPL Open Source license.

“JIRA is the world’s favorite issue tracker - it’s easy to use, easy to deploy, easy to administer, and has an impressive, collaboration-friendly featureset,” said Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense. “By creating an ‘Open Source mashup’ from two of our partners’ technologies, we able to both add value to these highly established, well-respected projects, and give back to the Open Source community. The positive response to Scarlet has been overwhelming.”

“Scarlet is a great new option for our customers,” said Jeffrey Walker, President of Atlassian. “With the added bonus of Open Source distribution, Sourcesense offers new ways to grow the JIRA footprint, coupled with Terracotta, making collaborative information sharing possible for more teams.”

“We’re very happy to be able to power transparent clustering for JIRA. By combining the power of Terracotta’s transparent clustering with JIRA’s tracking and management solutions, Scarlet allows developers to greatly improve distributed computing environments with minimal effort,” said Orion Letizi, Co-Founder of Terracotta. “An improved experience benefits developers and users alike. We look forward to continued great new ideas from Sourcesense.”

Availability and Support
Freely available and fully compatible with the latest versions of JIRA and Terracotta, Scarlet v.1.0GA can be downloaded from the Scarlet download center

Commercial support, bundled distributions, professional services, and custom solutions are available from Sourcesense. Please contact atlassian @ sourcesense.com for more information.

About Sourcesense
Sourcesense is Europe’s leading Open Source systems integrator. Founded in 2006 as a merger of three consultancies specializing in Open Source implementation, configuration, and support, Sourcesense provides enterprise-grade solutions around key Open Source technologies. From Global Fortune 100 corporations to cutting-edge multimedia start-ups, Sourcesense clients rely on the company’s deep expertise in Open Source, with proven success in integration, innovation, and strategic advice on creating and sustaining competitive advantage by leveraging the latest industry developments. Sourcesense team members are highly regarded as long-term contributors to numerous prominent organizations in the Open Source community, including numerous projects and emerging initiatives currently in incubation at the Apache Software Foundation. For more information, visit the Sourcesense Website

REDMOND, Wash., and MILAN, Italy — March 25, 2008 — Microsoft Corp. and Sourcesense, a leading European open source systems integration consultancy, today announced that the two companies will collaborate on the strategy, development and deployment of open source solutions for the Microsoft Office product suite.

One of the initial goals of the partnership is contributing to the development of a new version of Apache POI, a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Widely used in financial services and critical enterprise applications across related sectors, Apache POI is a leading open source file format reader and writer to create, edit and read Microsoft Office formats used in Excel, Word, PowerPoint and Visio.

Apache POI is a Java application programming interface (API) used to access and manage Microsoft Office binary formats, and can be easily applied to today’s billions of binary format documents by alleviating the need for complex programming and/or reverse engineering. Because Apache POI libraries are used in numerous open source projects, developing future libraries to support the Ecma Office Open XML File Formats (the default file format in the 2007 Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint products) will play an important role in new interoperability scenarios where XML-based standard formats will be key for Office documents.

“Donating code to an established, consensus-driven organization such as the Apache Software Foundation benefits both our customers and the open source community at large,” said Sam Ramji, senior director of Platform Technology Strategy at Microsoft. “By helping contribute to new Apache solutions, we are putting our intentions into action, and giving back to this dynamic community. We’re excited to work with Sourcesense, whose experience in catalyzing Apache technologies and open development practices makes it the ideal partner.”

“Apache POI support for Open XML is compelling. It makes it easier to integrate, manage and deploy across the enterprise, and opens up valuable user contributions and feedback — an essential step to the interoperability and adoption of many collaboratively developed technologies,” said Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense. “Microsoft’s participation with the Apache community reinforces its commitment to bridging open standards with Open Source. Through our SHARE methodology, companies are able to more efficiently introduce, control and manage Open Source technology across their organization. The timing is perfect, and we’re thrilled to be a part of this important milestone.”

Apache POI support for Open XML is currently in development within the Apache Software Foundation; its first release is anticipated during the second quarter of 2008. Code contributions are made by ASF members and committers (developers authorized to “commit” or “write” code, patches or documentation to the ASF repository), and overseen by the Apache POI Project Management Committee (PMC).

A half-day training session on how to use Apache POI, led by Nick Burch, Apache POI PMC Chair, will be held at ApacheCon Europe in Amsterdam, Netherlands, taking place April 7–11, 2008. Those interested can visit http://eu.apachecon.com/ for training details and registration.

The community is welcome to participate by joining Apache POI mailing lists, submitting bug fixes, writing documentation and more. Downloads, documentation, participation and community information can be found at http://poi.apache.org.

About Sourcesense

Sourcesense is Europe’s leading Open Source systems integrator. Founded in 2006 as a merger of three consultancies specializing in Open Source implementation, configuration, and support, Sourcesense provides enterprise-grade solutions around key Open Source technologies. From Global Fortune 100 corporations to cutting-edge multimedia start-ups, Sourcesense clients rely on the company’s deep expertise in Open Source, with proven success in integration, innovation, and strategic advice on creating and sustaining competitive advantage by leveraging the latest industry developments. Sourcesense team members are highly regarded as long-term contributors to numerous prominent organizations in the Open Source community, including numerous projects and emerging initiatives currently in incubation at The Apache Software Foundation. For more information, visit http://www.sourcesense.com/

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. For more information, visit http://www.microsoft.com

Sourcesense will be at the upcoming Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Meet Sourcesense CEO Gianugo Rabellino at the panel “The Community Imperative: Building and Leveraging Community into IT” on Tuesday, March 25th.

Sourcesense announces immediate availability of Scarlet 1.0 RC2, the Open Source clustering solution for Atlassian JIRA built on top of Terracotta DSO. This intermediate release, which will be followed shortly by 1.0GA, fixes a few bugs, adds better documentation and logging support, and provides better compatibility with the latest versions of Terracotta and JIRA.

Scarlet can be downloaded at http://scarlet.sf.net: the product is distributed under the liberal MPL license, with commercial support and bundles available from Sourcesense. For more information about Sourcesense Scarlet offering, click here or send an email to atlassian@sourcesense.com.

Sourcesense è lieta di partecipare ed invitarTi al seminario

“Iniziative e Prospettive per l’Open Source nelle Aziende e nella Pubblica Amministrazione“

che si svolgerà nell’ambito del programma “Competenze Professionali per l’Innovazione Digitale” del Cantiere dei Mestieri ICT, il 26 Febbraio 2008 a Milano (ore 17.30) presso la sede di SIAM 1838.

Una brochure con descrizione ed informazioni per la partecipazione è disponibile QUI.

Per ulteriori informazioni ed iscrizione visitare il sito cliccare QUI.

Sourcesense is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Scarlet 1.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) with support for Jira 3.12 and Terracotta 2.5.

Built on top of Terracotta DSO, Scarlet provides a flexible and powerful solution for highly demanding Jira environments. Version 1.0 RC1 marks a significant milestone in the development roadmap, providing API stabilization, performance improvements, generic WAR distribution support as well as a number of bug fixes and improvements.

Availability

From RC1 onwards, the Scarlet infrastructure has been moved to Sourceforge and can be found at http://scarlet.sf.net. Sourcesense anticipates final release of Scarlet v1.0 within Q1 2008. The first official version of Scarlet will come with an extended set of professional services from Sourcesense, including bundled distributions of Jira, Terracotta and Scarlet, support, custom extensions and more.

Changelog

General

• Scarlet web site on-line.

Compatibility

• Compatible with Terracotta 2.5.x (older versions are no more supported).
• Compatible with Atlassian Jira 3.12 (other versions are not supported).

Features

• Jira WAR distribution support.
• Jira distributed actions : it is now possible to create actions to automatically distribute custom code on every cluster node by using the APIs under the com.sourcesense.scarlet.invoker package.
• CacheGroup plugins API : Jira plugins can now use the CacheGroup API by using the com.sourcesense.scarlet.cache.CacheGroupHolder API (for advanced usage only).

Improvements

• Performance improvements.

Low Level

• Package com.atlassian.jira.infrastructure containing Scarlet specific code renamed to com.sourcesense.scarlet.

Support

Contact the Sourcesense Technical Team at atlassian@sourcesense.com atlassian@sourcesense.com for all commercial support inquiries, or visit the Sourcesense web site for more information.