Opera Open Sources Dragonfly 78
netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling. "This is Opera’s first full open source project, so there will be a learning curve. We ask you to bear with us while we get everything up and running and policies in place. Coming from a closed source background there are some hurdles to overcome, such as the current bug tracking system being on a closed server. We hope to migrate to an open bug tracking system as the project gets on its feet."
Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Interesting)
It boggles my mind why people pick project names that are not more original. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as domain registration, marketability and search rankings are concerned.
Opera was originally a Norwegian company, right? They should have went with the Norwegian word for Dragonfly: "Øyenstikker." Which literally means "Eye Poker." Well, okay, maybe not
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Funny)
A Linux distribution typically involves Linux.
As for the rest, I agree that it's a bit confusing, especially given the choice of license.
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Funny)
A Linux distribution typically involves Linux.
Yep, I'm an idiot. I mean FreeBSD. It was the first "live disc" that I ever experimented with.
Shall I assume the fetal position now or should my strategy be to hope that one of the first blows is directly to my skull resulting in my immediate unconsciousness?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Funny)
That's OK the so called FreeBSD and other "UNIX" operating systems are Linux Like operating system
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Funny)
That's OK ...
*pauses from apologetically grovelling*
... are you sure you're a Slashdot user? I would rather confuse Mohammad with Jesus in an internationally distributed newspaper attributed to my real name than confuse Linux with FreeBSD on Slashdot under a pseudonym.
Is this some sort of trap? Are
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:4, Funny)
Is this some sort of trap?
Run dude, they're just trying to slow you down and keep you posting so they can get your IP address and zero in on your location.
Re: (Score:1)
+1 insightful
Where is the "drunk like a llama" mod option?
Re: (Score:1)
Great! Now I can read usenet and email. Too bad Verizon has stopped carrying Usenet groups and providing POP email. They also refuse to give me the password on my modem so I can open the incoming ports. My Internet Service Provider has slowly-but-surely turned a WWW-only Provider. :-(
Anyway...... this is great news. I love Opera and Opera Dragonfly sounds like a great product. I wish them much success with their new open source plan. I hope the users are patient enough to withstand the transition from close
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
*sigh* Another one seeking death in the BSD vs Linux affair, is it?
My son, the great Stallman taught us to be wary of those seeking martyrdom. Do you truly believe your actions worthy of those men that gave their lives in glory for Emacs vs Vi, or even more recently, Gnome vs KDE?
No. To your feet, knave. Your sentence is a short duration of trol
Re: (Score:2)
No worries, just put your geek card in the shredder and we'll call it even. When you leave the geekosphere and emerge into the social world again, the first girlfriend who dumps you is punishment enough.
Re: (Score:1)
FreeBSD supporters are dying - blows to their skulls confirm it.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder what Debian GNU/kFreeBSD [debian.org] would be considered.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
This just goes to show you how out of touch those in the web community are with the greater open source community. I mean, the Firefox developers fucked up twice, with the second time being when they outright stole the name of the Firebird [firebirdsql.org] RDBMS.
Re: (Score:2)
It's kind of too bad, though. You have Thunderbird, Sunbird, and Fire... fox. Nobody even knows what I firefox is. For years, I kept hearing people refer to the browser as "Fox Fire".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Live Linux BSD?
Confusion indeed.
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:4, Funny)
>>> Confusion indeed.
Can I run that Live Linux BSD on my Commodore with Amiga OS 4??? Or will it be incompatible with Workbench?
Re: (Score:1)
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:5, Insightful)
The name is not new, dragonfly has been in opera for something like 2 years.
Since it can not possibly be mistaken for dragonfly bsd, I think it's not a real problem. If you want your product name not to be used for something else, start by not using an existing word.
Re: (Score:1)
Since it can not possibly be mistaken for dragonfly bsd, I think it's not a real problem.
Sup dawg, I heard you like Open Source so I put a Dragonfly in your Dragonfly so you can Open Source while you Open Source.
Re: (Score:1)
Using similar names makes sense in marketing. "I'm looking for a civic." "Oh no, you meant Cirrus. We have one of those right over here," says the marketing drone. Confusion == opportunity to mislead customer.
Sometimes I think spending ten years in retail made me cynical. l-)
Re: (Score:2)
Dragonfly? Well, guess the FreeBSD fork by Matt Dillon (not the actor) that was named Dragonfly will now have to be referred to as Dragonfly BSD [wikipedia.org] to avoid confusion. That was one of the first live Linux distributions I played around with and what comes to mind when I hear the name "Dragonfly" in software.
It boggles my mind why people pick project names that are not more original. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as domain registration, marketability and search rankings are concerned.
First thing I thought of was the CMS [dragonflycms.org]... Obviously this is a crowded namespace. Seems to me that they could have picked something a little more original.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Dragonfly? Well, guess the FreeBSD fork by Matt Dillon (not the actor) that was named Dragonfly will now have to be referred to as Dragonfly BSD to avoid confusion.
It already was for as long as I can remember.
It boggles my mind why people pick project names that are not more original. You're basically shooting yourself in the foot as far as domain registration, marketability and search rankings are concerned.
When introduced, Opera Dragonfly was not a separate product - more like a feature in Opera. It's something that comes out of the box, so it doesn't need any particular marketability apart from Opera itself.
Re:Let the Name Confusion BEGIN! (Score:4, Funny)
I agree completely with your argument against adopting names used elsewhere. I was googling for local lacrosse teams, and next thing you know I'm at a dealership buying a Buick. It's so confusing.
Re: (Score:2)
If a motorcycle company decided to release a motorcycle called Buick, it might be more comparable. In this case it is two pieces of open-source software meant to run on general computing hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
I think what you're meant to do is demonstrate how one is considerably more confusing than the other.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In this case it is two pieces of open-source software meant to run on general computing hardware.
If you're going to describe it in the broadest possible terms, then yeah you can introduce confusion. If you realize that one of them is an operating system, and one of them is essentially a browser plugin, then you can use the context of the discussion to remove ambiguity.
"I used Dragonfly to inspect the DOM and modify some styles."
What do you think that means, do you think that means someone booted into BSD and somehow loaded up a document object and stylesheets into the OS?
"I booted into Dragonfly and u
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, until you try to search on the less popular of the two, and only get search results for the more popular. I had a lot of trouble with this when Firebird was a browser from mozilla and an open-source SQL engine.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
and their choice of chromium [google.com] was even more stupid because of an already existing game with such a name [reptilelabour.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, dragonfiles were not well-liked in N Europe in the past [wikipedia.org]. I particularly like "troll's spindle" and "Satan's little horse".
I never knew that's what my.opera.com was for! (Score:5, Funny)
Would someone be so kind as to provide a mirror?
I tried to RTFA, but my office has my.opera.com blocked under the Forbidden Category "Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit". Who knew?
Re:I never knew that's what my.opera.com was for! (Score:5, Informative)
Here:
Since the inception of Opera Dragonfly, we planned for it to become an open source project. It has always been released under an open source BSD licence, but the source repositories were on Opera servers. Starting today, Opera Dragonfly is a fully open source project, hosted on BitBucket. Since the previous version of Opera Dragonfly, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes replacing the existing architecture with a modern version of the Scope Protocol STP-1. Opera Dragonfly has been rewritten to use this faster and more efficient version of Scope. Now that we believe that the underlying protocol is stable and performant, and a public desktop build has been released with this included, it is time to put Opera Dragonfly on a public Mercurial repository.
If you have a Mercurial client you can visit the Opera Dragonfly STP-1 repository and check out the source code. We have provided initial documentation in the Wiki to get you started. This is Operas first full open source project, so there will be a learning curve. We ask you to bear with us while we get everything up and running and policies in place. Coming from a closed source background there are some hurdles to overcome, such as the current bug tracking system being on a closed server. We hope to migrate to an open bug tracking system as the project gets on its feet.
As well as the current and previous versions of the Opera Dragonfly source code, we have released a couple of tools to help with Opera Dragonfly development. The first is Dragonkeeper. This is a standalone proxy, which translates STP (Scope Transport Protocol) to HTTP. This can also be useful for remote debugging. The second tool is Hob. Hob is a utility to create code from Protocol Buffer descriptions. Protocol Buffers are one of the formats Scope STP-1 supports along with JSON and XML.
The focus of the current release of Opera Dragonfly was stability and performance. As such you will not see a great deal of new features. We believe it was invaluable to build a strong foundation, so we can advance faster, with less issues in the future. Two new features you may notice since the previous desktop release are a new element highlight (first introduced in Opera Mobile), and a colour picker utility. The highlight has been optimised since the mobile release, and supports visualising the metrics of an element on the page, and multiple element selection. The colour picker is still in early development. It allows for the magnification and selection of colours from the Web page. The value of the colour is displayed in both HSL, RGB and hexadecimal formats. Work has also began behind the scenes to take advantage of HTML5 Web Storage to store users settings and preferences. This will eventually allow the application to be greatly customisable, and to remember layout and settings from a previous session. One of the biggest usability issues has also been solved, with inspect element being available from the Web page context menu. This reduces the steps needed to start debugging a Web page.
The current focus for the Scope protocol is improving the JavaScript debugger. This work is nearing completion on the Scope side, and will provide functionality such as the Firebug Console API.
We hope you enjoy this version of Opera Dragonfly, and that some of you will be inspired enough to help with the Opera Dragonfly project. If you like a challenge, this is a great place to start. Visit the Opera Dragonfly repository to find out more information.
Re:I never knew that's what my.opera.com was for! (Score:5, Funny)
Here:
Since the inception of Opera Dragonfly, [...]
Irrelevant.
What we want is the "Intimate Apparel/Swimsuit" classified pages.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox has Firebug; a web debugger, basically -- tracing JavaScript execution, examining and poking at the DOM, CSS, etc.
Dragonfly is the same kind of thing for Opera; and indeed, potentially other browsers which support Scope Transport Protocol.
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh, I've had this problem before. Autodial ended up being the culprit.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a lot of stand alone email providers (even google) that offer POP3 (though I prefer IMAP4). There's a handful of free Usenet providers as well (no binary groups in most of the free usenet servers). Not to mention that I've used Easynews in the past, mainly because they supported SourceForge downloads, and are a company that's local to me.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
This is the second time in less than 24 hours you pushed Chrome. Hmmm. (shrug)
Anyway I've heard that Opera is actually the #1 browser in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China. So if you live in those regions, it makes logical sense to use Opera as your development tool and target.
Re: (Score:1)
That was a really long-winded way of saying you don't do web design. Unlike RAM it's really easy to swap out web browsers. And all this means is you now have some sort of debugging tools on all major browsers. Which you were testing in anyway if you had half a brain.
Also, Firefox has had Firebug for years. So Chrome wasn't exactly innovating.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you believe it? Vista just came out a couple years ago and it's already gotten to the point that the original amount of RAM is completely used up by the OS.
Which is as it should be.
86% of Windows 7 PCs Maxing Out Memory [slashdot.org]
Re: (Score:1)
Except that instead of whatever magical caching thing you think was going on, the OS was thrashing the hard disk and performance was brought to a crawl.
With the extra RAM, the system runs like Jim Carrey on crack. What's more, memory usage is indicated at 47%, not pegged at 100%.
Re: (Score:2)
Vista [has] already gotten to the point that the original amount of RAM is completely used up by the OS.
Which is as it should be.
I thought the consensus in comments to our last article about this issue was that Windows was deciding wrong about what to evict from RAM: namely swapping out running processes in favor of keeping disk files cached that need not be cached.
Re: (Score:2)
Should I go with the best browser (Opera)? How about the most wide-spread browser (IE)? Or should I target the browser most likely to gain the most marketshare (Webkit, aka Chrome and Safari)?
Yes. When your site or application is not working in a given browser, you use that browser's tools to figure out why.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:But Opera develops all new features first! (Score:5, Informative)
I propose a new betting pool: How long until an Opera fanatic claims Opera developed Dragonfly first, and Firebug is just a ripoff.
Actually before Dragonfly opera had a different set of developer tools, called Developer Console
Opera Developer Console
Opera now includes a developer console that can be added into the browser with many new features. The developer console includes new tools including DOM inspector, JavaScript inspector, CSS editor and HTTP header inspector.
Which were released 15 Nov, 2006, and on my research that is a year or so before firefox.
Link: http://dev.opera.com/tools/
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Re: (Score:1)
I propose a new betting pool: How long until an Opera fanatic claims Opera developed Dragonfly first, and Firebug is just a ripoff.
Actually before Dragonfly opera had a different set of developer tools, called Developer Console
Opera Developer Console
Opera now includes a developer console that can be added into the browser with many new features. The developer console includes new tools including DOM inspector, JavaScript inspector, CSS editor and HTTP header inspector.
Which were released 15 Nov, 2006, and on my research that is a year or so before firefox.
Link: http://dev.opera.com/tools/ [opera.com]
That's not a comparison for Firebug, it's their version of the Web Developer [chrispederick.com] extension. Also, that's not a "year or so" before Firebug: oldest post in Firebug group [google.com] is 18th Nov, 2006
There's always google (Score:3, Insightful)
netux writes to mention that Opera has released Dragonfly, their answer to Firebug, as an open source project under the BSD license. The release features a complete architectural overhaul using a modern version of the Scope Protocol (STP-1), a Mercurial repository on BitBucket, and a Wiki to get the ball rolling.
But would it be too much to ask that the summary contains at least once sentence about WTF the Scope Protocol is and what it can be used for?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Comment above was written in C++ instead of C and thus contains a C too many. Please do a C-- before mentally compiling.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
After googling it (as TFA is slashdotted for me), the relevant information that is missing from the headline//blurb is:
Opera Dragonfly is a cross device, cross platform debugging environment for the Opera browser
Re: (Score:2)
Is it too much to ask that people type some words into a box at the top of the browser [lmgtfy.com], and then actually contribute to the discussion? FFS, it's the first result:
Re: (Score:2)
Grumble (Score:5, Funny)
Sigh.
--- Matt starts working on Opera Viruses.
-Matt
Re: (Score:1)
Go Matt Go! Opera is for the rich and snooty! And you can only enjoy it if the acoustics are just right and you have a decent.. ooh wait....the browser currently known as Opera.
I'll have to sing a different tune now.
Davonshire
Re: (Score:2)
Kudos to Opera (Score:1, Troll)
Yeah silly them (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not like they make any money by selling it to Nintendo and others, they should opensource their code just because.
Opera is the perfect example of how closed source and opensource can exist next to each other AND show you the advantages and disadvantages of both models.
Firefox vs Opera has some interesting differences. Firefox is more adjustable especially with its extensions, Opera feels more solid like someone actually was in charge of all its different features and insisted they work together. Take mouse-gestures and tabbed browsing. Firefox gives more choice but it feels very clear that these things are bolted on, while in Opera they come as they are but are how the browser has been designed to work from the start.
No, keep Opera closed source, competition from different suppliers is a good thing.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see your point. Open-source projects can compete, too, you know.
Opera === EU Penalties (Score:1, Offtopic)