Your boss wants you to implement an open source Java application server. You've heard a lot about JBoss, now a unit of Red Hat, but are wondering if you might fare better with one that's less well established a project whose development team is working with a set of fresh concepts.

There's Sun Microsystems' GlassFish, the Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo and the French consortium ObjectWeb's Jonas. How do you quickly evaluate the alternatives and make a choice?

Well, you might turn to Ohloh.net. Ohloh is a start-up company that's been crawling open source project servers and collecting statistics for more than a year. Then it automatically evaluates them according to a few standard metrics displays the results.

As Ohloh launched in February 2006, it attracted a lot of blogging and exchange of comments from developers involved in open source projects. Was it collecting the right data? Would its statistics offer a means of comparison or yield valuable information? How would the individual developers behind the statistics ever emerge from the haze of information?

Some of those questions are being answered by the active, volunteer participation in ohloh.net by open source developers themselves. Project managers have been steering the Ohloh crawler to the right CVS or Subversion or GIT server to retrieve the best stats on their projects.

Tim O'Brien, author of the Jakarta Commons Cookbook for Java developers, says in a post to the open source publisher O'Reilly Media's OnJava blog, "To the uninitiated middle manager, open source is chaos, confusion and uncertainty. If you are not familiar with the community, how do you sift through the noise?" The answer, as least in part, he says, is Ohloh.net.

At the site, you can compare metrics between open source projects. JBoss, for example, remains a strong ongoing project with 166 contributors, 74 of which have contributed in the last year. Furthermore, it's "the number one most used Java application server on the market" among the open source offerings.