Anahita Social Engine ™ is an open source platform, framework, and design methodology for building all kinds of social networking applications and services using an organic Nodes-Graphs-Stories architecture. Anahita Social Engine ™ has been developed using the Nooku ™ Rapid Application Development Framework.

Anahita framework and platform is an ideal solution for developing any type of web services and web application that is in a social networking context. A few examples are online learning, community markets, citizen journalism, Project Management sites, Intranets, and social coding.

Anahita project has been initiated by 2 of the Purplerat Co-Founders Rastin Mehr and Ash Sanieyan from rmdStudio and Peerglobe Technology

Nooku Framework is a powerful MVC Rapid Application Development Framework that runs alongside Joomla's own framework. Nooku Framework provides excellent out-of-the-box security features. The great design patterns based architecture makes the developed applications very flexible: all your code automatically becomes re-usable, extendible and replaceable. Nooku Framework is available under the GPL license from Nooku.org/framework.html

Joomla! is an award-winning and one of the world's most popular open source content management systems (CMS), which enables you to build and maintain websites and host web applications.

Providing both a CMS platform and software development framework Joomla! is perhaps one of the first technologies that closed the gap between the web development and software development worlds. That is compare to CMS solutions such as Wordpress and Drupal which have roots in the web development world and provide no software development framework, and solutions such as Ruby on Rails or CakePHP that provide all the low level software development libraries but no our of box CMS tools.

Joomla! is available from Joomla.org website under the GPL2 license

Wordpress is perhaps the most popular and most user friendly open source blogging platform in the world developed by Automattic.com and it is being used on high traffic websites such as CNN and New York Times blogs. Wordpress is extendible by using plugins and it has a very good reputation for being user friendly and writer friendly. Their automatic update system has also made the process of patching and updating Wordpress application and plugins quite painless and simple. Wordpress is also entering the Social Networking realm using their recent project BuddyPress.com

Drupal is one of the 3 most popular open source content management systems next to Joomla! and Wordpress. Drupal is known as a Content Management Framework (different from a Software Development Framework) which provides lots of flexibility to create many different content types and ways to do information architecture. Drupal's functionality can be extended using custom modules. Drupal does provide APIs but it does not provide a software development framework which is one reason it is not an ideal platform for developing Internet Software development projects.

Ruby on Rails® or RoR is an open source web framework for rapid development of web applications following the Agile Development methodology. RoR promotes concepts such as "Convention over Configuration" and "Do Not Repeat Yourself" DRY so the created software code becomes as efficient and maintainable as possible. Twitter.com and Bascame from 37Signals are 2 well known projects that are developed using the RoR framework.