Yesterday we had an entire day at Liip dedicated to various talks, workshops and hanging out together. It really reminded me again what an amazing company Liip is. Its really what I wished m company back in Berlin should have been. Fun, smart, successful, productive, agile, good. At any rate I wanted to mention the stuff we are working on in terms of OSS. Obviously Chregu and myself are active on PHP. Jordi is also an active member of the PHP.net community. But we have other less known stuff that should also get noted, like Jackalope, Mahara, Picok, GottaGo and Okapi.

Jackalope is an implementation of the client side JCR standard for PHP. This will enable us making happy agile frontends that are managed with all the various Enterprise features like versioning, ACL's etc. Liip created this project but is looking for others to join. We are already sharing the interfaces with the typo3 guys.

Mahara is a social networking platform that has spawned out of the Moodle e-learning community. Penny recently joined Liip and she was actually one of the original founders of the project.

Picok is a one of my babies. Its sort of an OSS iGoogle. So it allows you to easily create new so called portlets, that can aggregate content from various internal and external data sources and present them in a user customizable interface. Originally created for one of our clients the Raiffeisen Bank here in Switzerland. They were kind enough to let us open source the code. In return we won them a couple prizes at the Swiss Web Awards :)

GottaGo actually took the Swiss Web Awards by storm. It won the grand prize along with a few other category prizes. Its an iPhone app that basically finds the fasted route via public transportation from point A to B here in Switzerland. Oh and I should stop referring to it as GottaGo, since its now called "Transport".

Okapi is our super lightweight framework. Recently Chregu and I have started working on version 2. Basically we took various Symfony2 components and integrated them into our code. Currently its still in proof of concept stage, but it looks quite promising. I am really seeing a lot of potential in the service container and event dispatcher. I also think it could become a very useful addition to the Symfony eco-system as it seems quite feasible to migrate from Okapi2 to Symfony2 or vice versa. Meaning it will be able to choose if you want something simple and lean or you need something full features, without having to need to learn two totally different frameworks. Chregu has ported liip.to to this proof of concept, so check it out!

These days I was thinking about your Picok as I remembered a blog post you were asking how to optimize a query or something like that. That's because I'm currently planning a site management plugin for symfony 1.2 and I want it to support a similar concept so you can define areas/columns and drop components into them. Picok looks very nice. Maybe I can get some inspiration from your db schema.

The other thing is Okapi. I don't understand why you have "yet another framework". But I guess it has historical reasons. I overcame this "we need to have our own cool framework" fortunately as I found symfony. It allows me now to put time in more important things: "creating our own cool plugin library" (which I plan to publish later this summer).

There is a lot you can steal from Picok. Actually Picok's "controller" could be considered to be the javascript. I think we have a huge need for MVC frameworks on the javascript side. We have done a fairly good job in the absence of one. Another interesting aspect is how we made it possible to manage different versions of plugins where the installation essentially just requires unzipping the plugin and adding a reference to the DB. As for the DB schema, its is quite simple.

Okapi originated back when there was no Symfony yet. It was also build around the idea of a very thin layer for a frontend with a java backend for the heavy lifting. It was also build around XSLT for templating. Since then it has evolved a lot, but still remains lightweight, which does have its advantages. While the documentation isn't great, the code is easy enough to comprehend in a few hours. But as I tried to explain, we are trying to make it easier to move to something full features.

Just a note... the initial link to Okapi is incorrect. It has okpai instead of okapi.

Thanks for the list of projects... I'll probably take a look at them this evening.

@Michael: thx .. fixed :)