“Slated to bear fruit by the end of the quarter, the Casbah
Project is an attempt to create a multilingual, cross-platform
framework for building Web applications, according to the project’s
leader, Kendall Clark, president of the North Texas Linux Users
Group.”
“The advantage of Casbah, says Clark, is that it provides a high
layer of abstraction so that less advanced programmers don’t have
to worry about all the behind-the-scenes details. For instance,
when a programmer wants to instruct the application to send or
retrieve data to a structured query language (SQL) database or to a
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) directory, he or she
writes to a single “back end” API, called Natroun. The NatrounAPI
then looks for the appropriate driver to determine where to get, or
put, the data.”
“The Casbah Project–while ambitious in scope–is one of
thousands of open source development projects currently underway
around the world, according to Eric Raymond, president of
OpenSource.Org, a group that promotes free access and
redistribution of source code.”