While working on knowledge management and semantic web technologies, I came across the Simile project at MIT a few years back. I even had a demo of the Exhibit widget fetching then displaying data from our semantic web application framework back in 2006 at the Web2 track of Solutions Linux in Paris.

Now that we are using these widgets when implementing web apps for clients, I was happy to see that the projects got a life of their own outside of MIT and became full-fledged free-software projects hosted on Google Code. See Simile-Widgets for more details and expect us to provide a debian package soon unless someone does it first.

Speaking of Debian, here is a nice demo a the Timeline widget presenting the Debian history.

As some readers of this blog may be aware of, Logilab has been developing its own framework since 2001. It evolved over the years trying to reach the main goal (managing and publishing data with style) and to incorporate the goods ideas seen in other Python frameworks Logilab developers had used. Now, companies other than Logilab have started providing services for this framework and it is stable enough for the core team to be confident in recommending it to third parties willing to build on it without suffering from the tasmanian devil syndrom.

CubicWeb version 3.0 was released on the last day of 2008. That's 7 years of research and development and (at least) three rewrites that were needed to get this in shape. Enjoy it at http://www.cubicweb.org/ !