eyeOS was a web desktop for

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

, whose main purpose is to enable collaboration and communication among users. It is mainly written in

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, and

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

. It is a private-cloud application platform with a web-based desktop interface. eyeOS delivers a whole desktop from the cloud with file management, personal management information tools, and collaborative tools, with the integration of the client's applications.

History

The first publicly available eyeOS version was released on August 1, 2005, as eyeOS 0.6.0 in

Olesa de Montserrat Olesa de Montserrat () is a municipality in the comarca of Baix Llobregat, in Catalonia, Spain. Olesa de Montserrat is well known around the nearby places because of its olive oil and textile Textile is an Hyponymy and hypernymy, umb ...

Barcelona Barcelona ( ; ; ) is a city on the northeastern coast of Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second-most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within c ...

(

Spain Spain, or the Kingdom of Spain, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe with territories in North Africa. Featuring the Punta de Tarifa, southernmost point of continental Europe, it is the largest country in Southern Eur ...

). A worldwide community of developers soon took part in the project and helped improve it by translating, testing, and developing it. After two years of development, the eyeOS Team published eyeOS 1.0 on June 4, 2007. Compared with previous versions, eyeOS 1.0 introduced a complete reorganization of the code and some new web technologies, like eyeSoft, a

portage Portage or portaging ( CA: ; ) is the practice of carrying water craft or cargo over land, either around an obstacle in a river, or between two bodies of water. A path where items are regularly carried between bodies of water is also called a '' ...

-based web software installation system. Moreover, eyeOS also included the eyeOS Toolkit, a set of libraries allowing easy and fast development of new

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

s. With the release of eyeOS 1.1 on July 2, 2007, eyeOS changed its license and migrated from GNU GPL Version 2 to Version 3. Version 1.2 was released just a month after the 1.1 version and integrated full compatibility with

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor program, word processing program developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platf ...

files. * eyeOS 1.5 Gala was released on January 15, 2008. This version was the first to support both

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

and

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

file formats for documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. With this version, eyeOS also gained the ability to import and export documents in both formats using server-side scripting. * eyeOS 1.6 was released on April 25, 2008, and included many improvements such as synchronization with local computers, drag and drop, a mobile version, and more. * eyeOS 1.8 Lars was released on January 7, 2009, and featured a completely rewritten file manager and a new sound

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

to develop media-rich applications. Later, on April 1, 2009, 1.8.5 was released with a new default theme and some rewritten apps, such as the Word Processor and the Address Book. On July 13, 2009, 1.8.6 was released with an interface for the

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

and a new version of eyeMail with support for

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. Today, POP version 3 (POP3) is the most commonly used version. Together with IMAP, i ...

and

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

. * eyeOS 1.9 was released on December 29, 2009. It was followed up with the 1.9.0.1 release with minor fixes on February 18, 2010. These releases were the last of the "classic desktop" interfaces. A major re-work was completed in March 2010, now called eyeOS 2.x. However, a small group of eyeOS developers still maintain the code within the eyeOS forum, where support is provided, but the eyeOS group itself has stopped active 1.x development. It is now available as th
On-eye project
on GitHub. Active development was halted on 1.x as of February 3, 2010. eyeOS 2.0 release took place on March 3, 2010. This was a total restructure of the operating system. The 2.x stable is the new series of eyeOS, which is in active development and will replace 1.x as stable in a few months. It includes live collaboration and more social capabilities than eyeOS 1.x. eyeOS then released 2.2.0.0 on July 28, 2010. On December 14, 2010, a working group inside the eyeOS open-source development community began the structure development and further upgrade of eyeOS 1.9.x. The group's main goal is to continue the work eyeOS has stopped on 1.9.x. eyeOS released 2.5 on May 17, 2011. This was the last release under an

open source license Open-source licenses are software licenses that allow content to be used, modified, and shared. They facilitate free and open-source software (FOSS) development. Intellectual property (IP) laws restrict the modification and sharing of creative ...

. It is available on

SourceForge SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

for download under another project called
eyeOS 2.5 Open Source Version
'. On April 1, 2014,

Telefónica , S.A. () is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company with registered office and headquarters located in two different places, both in Madrid, Spain. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the ...

announced their acquisition of eyeOS. This acquisition reinforces its future mobile cloud services plans and the development of free software solutions. eyeOS will maintain its headquarters in the Catalonia, Spain, where their staff will continue to work but will now form part of Telefónica. After its integration into Telefónica, eyeOS will continue to function as an independent subsidiary, led by its current CEO, Michel Kisfaludi.

Structure and API

For developers, EyeOS provides the eyeOS Toolkit, a set of libraries and functions to develop applications for eyeOS. Using the integrated

Portage Portage or portaging ( CA: ; ) is the practice of carrying water craft or cargo over land, either around an obstacle in a river, or between two bodies of water. A path where items are regularly carried between bodies of water is also called a '' ...

-based eyeSoft system, one can create their own repository for eyeOS and distribute applications through it. Each core part of the desktop is its own application, using

to send server commands as the user interacts. As actions are performed using

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(such as launching an application), it sends event information to the server. The server then sends back tasks for the client to do in XML format, such as drawing a widget. On the server, eyeOS uses

files to store information. This makes it simple for a user to set up on the server, as it requires zero configuration other than the account information for the first user, making it simple to deploy. To avoid bottlenecks that flat files present, each user's information and settings are stored in different files, preventing

resource starvation In computer science, resource starvation is a problem encountered in concurrent computing where a process is perpetually denied necessary resources ''Resource'' refers to all the materials available in our environment which are Technology, te ...

from occurring, though this in turn may create issues in high volume user environments due to host operating system open file descriptor limits.

Professional edition

A Professional Edition of eyeOS was launched on September 15, 2011, as an operating system for businesses. It uses a new version number and was released under version 1.0 instead of continuing with the next version number in the open source project. The Professional Edition retains the web desktop interface used by the open source version while targeting enterprise users. A host of new features designed for enterprises, like file sharing and synchronization (called eyeSync), Active Directory/LDAP connectivity, system-wide administration controls, and a local file execution tool called eyeRun were introduced. A new suite of Web Apps (a mail client, calendar, instant messaging, and collaboration tools) was also introduced, specific to the enterprise edition for the web desktop. With eyeOS Professional Edition 1.1, a to-do task manager tool, Citrix XenApp integration, and a

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like 'wall' for collaboration were introduced.

Awards

* 2007 – Received the

Softpedia Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. It is ranked as among of the top download portals on the internet. History So ...

's Pick award. * 2007 – Finalist at

's 2007 Community Choice Awards at the "Best Project" category. The winner for that category was

7-Zip 7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own Archive file, archive forma ...

. * 2007 – Won the

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Spain Web Revelation award in the Technology category. * 2008 – Finalist for the Webware 100 awards by CNET, under the "Browsing" category. * 2008 – Finalist at the SourceForge's 2008 Community Choice Awards at the "Most Likely to Change the World" category. The winner for that category was Linux. * 2009 – Selected Project of the Month (August 2009) by SourceForge. * 2009 – BMW Innovation Award. * 2010 – Winner of Accelera (Ernst & Young). * 2010 – Asturias & Girona Spanish Prince award “IMPULSA”. * 2011 – Winner of MIT's

TR35 The Innovators Under 35 is a peer-reviewed annual award and listicle published by ''MIT Technology Review'' magazine, naming the world's top 35 innovators under the age of 35. at '' Technology Review'' with lists of winners at technologyreview.com ...

award as Innovator of the Year in Spain.

Community

eyeOS community is formed with the eyeOS forums, which reached 10,000 members on April 4, 2008; the eyeOS wiki; and the eyeOS Application Communities, available at the eyeOS-Apps website, hosted and provided by openDesktop.org as well as Softpedia.

References