From the 'Let the Wookie Win' files:

As all geeks know, today is the 35th anniversary of the release of Star Wars (and it's also Towel Day too). What you may not have known is that today also marks the release of Apache Wookie 0.10.0.

Yes, Star Wars' cultural relevance extends deep, all the way into open source.



Apache Wookie is still a young project at the incubation phase, but it's an interesting one. The project is a Java Application Server, for widgets. The widgets can be W3C compliant and work with the OpenSocial effort (that is yes, still alive).

According to the Wookie project page:



"Administrators can upload Widgets packaged according to the W3C Widgets specification. Wookie makes these available to applications using a REST API. These widgets can then be hosted in a container application such as Drupal, Wordpress, Moodle, Elgg or any other web based system. Container applications may have a plugin that communicates with the Wookie server and enables users to pick widgets from a gallery. These are then added to user pages by the container application."





The new 0.10.0 release includes new API key management, support for JSON APIs and a new JQuery demo application that can be used to test widgets. Wookie now also has a feature extension to support OpenAjax Hub, which means you can have widgets communicating with other widgets with the use of the Apache Rave project.



Now what do widgets have to do with Wookies? Not much I suspect. Chewbacca however was a talented mechanic and without him the Falcon likely wouldn't have made the Kessel run as fast as it did...

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.