Open Source at Hi5

Another LinuxWorld conference has come and gone.  Many people from Hi5 attended, which just goes to show how important Linux and other Open Source products are for our business.

Hi5's success is based in large part on these high quality open source products.  Our entire site runs using open source software on a Linux platform.  We've found that this provides us with unparalleled flexibility, performance and low costs.

To make Hi5 run we use all of the following products:

• Linux Servers running SuSE Enterprise Linux
• Apache and Lighttpd web servers
• PostgreSQL, a highly scalable database
• Squid for web acceleration
• Resin and Tomcat Java Application Servers
• Struts, our MVC platform
• iBatis - for Object Relational Mapping
  
• Spring - Java Application Framework
  
• Memcached, where we cache as much as possible.
  
• Lucene indexing and search engine
• Enunciate web service deployment framework
  

In addition to being users of these products Hi5 has been more and more active in the community efforts surrounding these Open Source projects.   We've moved beyond mailing list activity and bug reports to actively  contributing code and sponsoring development work.  You can expect more and more of this in the future.

It's all very exciting!  If working with open source projects is your thing then you should definitely check out our careers page.  We'll be talking more about our open source contributions in the months to come, so stay tuned to our blog.

Paul

Update: Lou tells me that we have a few more obscure software components that we enjoy using:

• SiteMesh - Web Page Layout and Decoration Framework.
• StringTemplate - Simple templating engine.
• JRobin - RRDtool for Java
• ImageJ - Image Manipulation toolkit