bombguy

This was the product that convinced me there's a point to open source. It's a well-managed, well-documented, well-focused, and competent project.

Weaknesses include scalability and performance. It does not yet compete with commercial systems in this regard. Stored procedures/procedural languages are a little wonky as well, but you can get the job done.

Numerous add-ins are robust and well-maintained. The product is a fave of educators and researchers resulting in some amazing tools to solve niche problems. Oracle and Microsoft aren't worried about losing database revenue, but I bet they're scared about the database extension community.

Pros: you can be up and running a full GNU tools environment on Windows in 20 minutes. Vast support for anything credible and it just works. Frankly, I don't know how even the most hardened MS fanboy could efficiently write code or manage a Windows box without this stuff.

Cons: Windows ACLs + Unix permissions equals some entertaining snafus in complex deploys. Many tools (Postgres, Ruby, etc) are inferior to x86 native builds due to Cygwin emulation overhead. Use this to get started but seek alternate distributions for key components of production systems.

Dishonorable mention: the setup utility is clearly designed by a crazy person. This brilliant utility also takes the place of a package manager, which means you're never more than one wrong click away from updating your entire toolset by accident. Mindblowingly idiotic.

A great example of what's enabled by the PostgreSQL GiST architecture. Ships in the postgres /contrib directory but grab the latest from postgis.org as they're on unrelated release schedules.

Short review: you can make it work, but expect to spend days, not "10 minutes" fully deploying the beast for anything but the most trivial installations.

Pros: a clean, simple, gallery add-in for your budding LAMP web empire. Good architecture. Some nifty plug-ins. Some even work.

Cons: confusing for users to add images. Poor import support. Ugly templates. Insane, sloppy CSS.

Both sides claim it integrates with WordPress 2.x. It does not. Prepare to spend hours in template hell sorting out the mess.

Camino's major touted feature is that it uses Aqua buttons and controls and ignores what web designers specify using CSS. They achieved this and a small performance bump by using native Mac controls instead of XUL.

Tradeoff is that it "will never" support Firefox plugins (per their website) and it renders websites differently than IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari 3.

But hey, it stores website passwords in Keychain and was a nice proving ground for key developers who now work on more relevant projects.

Call up any server admin who manages shared hosting sites. Ask him which product has consistently caused the most grief over the past two years.

If you like waking up to find your website covered in porn with all your user accounts compromised, this is the product for you.