The Project

The Horde Project is an open source project with a very active and robust community. The applications and libraries are developed by the Core Team members, with countless contributions from the community.

The guiding principles of the Horde Project are to create solid standards-based applications using intelligent object oriented design that, wherever possible, are designed to run on a wide range of platforms and backends.

There is great emphasis on making Horde as friendly to non-English speakers as possible. The Horde Framework currently supports many localization features such as unicode and right-to-left text. Generous users have also contributed many translations for the framework and applications.

Currently Horde Project boasts many enterprise-ready applications, that are deployed in countless demanding environments, and numerous exciting applications still in development.

The Code

The development of the framework libraries and applications is a community process, with contributions both from individual developers and corporations. The Core Team members are the people who are actively involved with designing and coding the framework and applications.

The applications are under various Open Source licenses, mostly under the GNU Public License. The Horde Framework libraries are mostly released under the LGPL and the BSD License.

The Horde applications are written in PHP, a scripting language explicitly designed to be embedded in web pages. PHP can be embedded directly into the web server, with plugins for not just Apache but also IIS, Sun Web Server, and Lighttpd etc.

Horde modules should run on any platform that can run PHP (including as a cgi), assuming any required support modules (IMAP, for instance) are present. The latest version of Horde, Horde 4 requires the use of PHP 5.2 or above.