One of the joys of software development is the ease with which you can create complex stuff out of thin air–or your own imagination. Creating new software may fulfill a need that could not otherwise be met. However, you can take advantage of a standardized way of doing things, so that you don’t have to start from scratch every single time. In the case of infrastructure software, using an established standard enables you to concentrate on your specific business needs, and not the supporting systems.
The seed of this article is actually a comment on the first article[1] in this series. In that first article, I described middleware as though it were plumbing. I chose to use this analogy as the term “middleware” is often misunderstood. My rationale for the plumbing analogy was that plumbing and middleware share these characteristics:
First, it’s mostly invisible. Second, it provides a standard way of doing things. Third, it ties together parts of complex systems. Fourth, and finally, it lets you worry about other things. » Read more
I listened to a webcast from JBoss World today with a group of people. After hearing several speakers announce new middleware products and initiatives (as JBoss is the leading force in open source middleware), one of them turned to me and asked, “Just what is middleware?” When I started to describe transaction servers and database connection pool sharing, she held up a hand and said, “No. I want to know what it is in real world terms, and why it’s a big deal.” » Read more
After having spent the past year and a half living and working in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how “the community” supports and makes possible the creation of high quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that produces open source software may look like an absurdly small number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a particular office park. It also includes all the contributors, anywhere in the world, in the project’s community. » Read more
This article introduces Conga, a new application released as part of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5. Walk through setting up your cluster and storage systems properly. Preview some of the major features of this new clustering and storage management tool.
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A Unix daemon is a program that runs in the “background,” enabling you to do other work in the “foreground,” and is independent of control from a terminal. Daemons can either be started by a process, such as a system startup script, where there is no controlling terminal, or by a user at a terminal without “tying up” that terminal as the daemon runs. But which daemons can you safely play with? Which should you leave running?
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This is the fourth in a series of articles on the Dogtail automated GUI test framework. Last time, we showed how Dogtail is being used by the Frysk project team to create automated GUI tests. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at Dogtail’s objected oriented tree API and walk through examples of how you can use this API to develop automated GUI tests.
