Project Kenai (pronounced Keen-Eye, according to Tim Bray) is a new project hosting platform from Sun. It integrates several source code management systems, forums, mailinglists, issue-tracking systems and wikis. In this regard it's similar to Google Code, RubyForge and SourceForge. GitHub, like Kenai, is built on Ruby on Rails, is currently focussed on hosting git repositories. Sun, as one of the biggest open source supporting companies in the world now also offers a platform, not only for its own projects, but for arbitrary open source projects.
An interesting aspect of Kenai is that it is built with Ruby on Rails and runs on JRuby, which is only consequent, considering Sun's support for JRuby. But JRuby isn't the only Sun project involved: Kenai runs on multiple GlassFish instances on OpenSolaris and uses MySQL as its database. One of the leaders of the project is Nick Sieger, who is well known for his engagement in JRuby where he wrote the original implementation of the ActiveRecord-JDBC connector.
Tim Bray's interview with Nick Sieger has more details on the technical aspects of Kenai:
We’re using Sun T2000 servers along with an X4500 for storage. OpenSolaris Nevada 70b is the OS. (We haven’t been able to upgrade to OpenSolaris with IPS yet because there is no SPARC port of IPS. We’re eagerly awaiting it though.) Apache runs in front, using mod_proxy_balancer to connect to multiple redundant GlassFish V2 instances talking to a single MySQL database. The main site is a Rails application running on JRuby, deployed in GlassFish as a war file built with Warbler. Perl, Python, and other various bits of Apache-based bailing wire help integrate Mercurial, Subversion, Sympa (mailing list software) and Bugzilla into the mix as well.
Even more technical details and some performance numbers can be found in Fernando Castano's presentation from RailsConf Europe.
Kenai allows to choose from a subset of recommended, OSI-approved licenses - but it's possible to choose to see a much more comprehensive list when creating projecs. Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, elaborates on the licensing issue in detail on his blog.
Future plans for the project include the integration of additional issue-tracking systems like JIRA and Git as an SCM option.
What is your favorite platform for project hosting?
