The Outercurve Foundation has announced the acceptance of the OData Library for Objective C into its endorsed rank of open-source-centric technology. The OData Library for Objective C supports cross-platform interoperability of tools essential for mobile developers and is similar to libraries available for .NET, Java, and other languages.
The platform-, technology-, and license-agnostic spokespeople at Outercurve confirm that developers can use the library to connect to OData feeds by leveraging code that makes it easier to build queries and parse AtomPub and JSON responses from the server. Accepting the project into Outercurve will, says the foundation, support interoperability and make it simpler for iOS developers to adopt and contribute to the OData Library.
In line with its latest agnostically filtered judgments, the foundation is also expected to announce details of its new Mentor Program, which appears to have been designed to deliver more project-specific relevance. While Outercurve has already had active mentorship activities in motion for project and gallery managers, the new program is still only described in generic terms as providing more support to create successful projects, develop and transmit an Outercurve culture, and develop an environment of leadership development.
According to the organization's publicity arm, "The mentor program will introduce gallery and project managers to the 'Outercurve Way', which emphasizes collaboration/community development over specific tools/development process; training and mentoring over incubation, and development guidance/best practices over fixed development methodologies."
Outercurve recently completed a developer survey; top-line results include:
- Ninety percent of respondents use open source in their work. Eighty percent indicated they use OSS to save time and money by using existing code instead of creating code from scratch.
- Open source is a path to productivity for many respondents (62 percent) who choose it for its greater choice of tools, platforms, communities, and projects.
- Forty-four percent of developers contribute to open source to improve their careers and credibility. The theme of developing software to improve credibility is a common one.
- Seventy percent of Outercurve survey respondents use forums to stay in touch with project communities.
