Tucked into a corner of the JavaOne exposition floor, it is rather ironic and disheartening that so little space was provided to the very open source community largely responsible for the existence of so many companies occupying the sea of other booths. Dubbed the ”.Org Zone”, this area was designated as shared space for any open source project interested in manning a table for a scheduled 1-2 hour timeslot. I swung by the .Org Zone Thursday afternoon to speak with the various project representatives who happened to be present at that time, and while I left a bit embarrassed by the accommodations provided to these great projects, was once again reminded of just how much these individuals are capable of accomplishing despite so few resources. This brief highlights my conversations with some of the project representatives.

Vodafone R&D Presents Bvine

Vodafone Group’s R&D Lab offered a tour of Vodafone Bvine, a recently launched online service intended to provide mobile and desktop-based telephony developers with online resources and hosting space for mobile and internet telephony applications. Project representative Peter Thompson acknowledged the website wasn’t created to compete with open source project hosting behemoth SourceForge, which hosts well over 1,000 projects classified under the “Internet Phone” and “Telephony” categories alone, but rather is intended to be a gathering and support spot for developers specifically interested in the mobile/telephony space.

Despite having only been launched this past January, a look at the Bvine website turns up a rather eclectic array of projects. Among the more popular include SunsetGPSLogr, a Windows Mobile GPS logging application capable of charting routes using Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth and geo-tagging locations with photos. Another popular project titled GameOfRealLife brings some levity to the daily grind with its mobile take on the classic Game of Life computer science project.

Bvine is a particularly interesting project because of the clear mutually beneficial relationship between the corporate entity and interested open source contributors. Vodafone provides the hosting resources in return for a firsthand look at a breeding ground for future corporate endeavors. Indeed, Thompson said opportunities may arise in which Vodafone would consider pursuing employment and partnership opportunities with the creators and contributors to particularly promising projects.

Stay tuned for further Vodafone announcements, as Thompson mentioned a variety of Vodafone-specific APIs were in the works, including interfaces for connecting to its SMS and MMS networks.

OpenOffice.org Simplifies Extension Development

An editor and writer by trade, I couldn’t help but approach the OpenOffice.org booth to learn of the very latest announcements and projects. OpenOffice.org / StarOffice marketing representative Kay Koll’s enthusiastic, almost frantic greeting proved quickly my decision was a good one. Kay demonstrated the new OpenOffice.org API plugin for NetBeans, which renders the creation of new OpenOffice features an incredibly easy task. Within the span of a few minutes Kay created a working new mathematical function capable of multiplying a Calc (the OpenOffice.org equivalent to Microsoft Excel) cell by two. Although a trivial feature, the ease in which Kay was able to create and deploy the new feature was previously anything but.

Kay has recently contributed an article to NetBeans Magazine introducing the new plug-in module, aptly titled OpenOffice.org NetBeans Integration. You can also learn more about integration possibilities on the OpenOffice.org wiki.