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Linux and Open Source News for 11th December 2007
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Linux Today News Service
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Source: Linux Today #open.ended: "My old mobile phone, which was held together with duct tape for the last few months of its sad existence, has finally been replaced with something more modern "
Source: Linux Today Linux.com: "Sometimes when I run ls to get a directory listing, I am looking for a specific file, but I want to see the whole context where the file resides "
Source: Linux Today InformationWeek: "Microsoft stirred up controversy last week when it suggested a Linux-based laptop for children in developing nations be redesigned to accommodate Windows. Would that be a good move ?"
Source: Linux Today HackFUD: "The most persistent complaint you hear about Linux from the wintel community is that it's for geeks "
Source: Linux Today The Open Road: "In what should be a boon to commercial open-source software vendors, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that tech spending is set for a big slowdown in 2008 "
Source: Linux Today Hoosier Penguin: "But as I was talking with Drebes, a couple of things stuck me: is JanRain too ambitious, and will that ambition get them into trouble down the line ?"
Source: Linux Today Datmation: "Every couple of years, someone compiles a list of programs that GNU/Linux needs to compete on the desktop "
Source: Linux Today Roundup: Both Linux.com and Linux Magazine have posted their 2007 holiday gift guides. Now you can get your favorite edit--uh, person--the geeky gift they've coveted.
Source: Linux Today BBC: "Now US journalist John Dvorak has weighed into the debate, dismissing the laptop as a 'little green computer' that changes nothing, and arguing that sending food aid to Africa is a better way to solve the continent's problems "
Source: Linux Today Reuters/ZDNet: "Red Hat has postponed until January the launch of a new Linux software product for personal computers that would directly compete with Microsoft'S Windows operating system "
Source: Linux Today Computerworld Australia: "With more than 30 years of history behind it, AUUG, the organization for Unix, Linux and open source professionals, faces its toughest challenge to stay in tact as members at the 2007 AGM decide its future this week "
Source: Linux Today KernelTrap: "GNU Project and Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman posted a message on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list titled, 'real men don't attack straw men,' suggesting that some comments he had made were being misrepresented "
Source: Linux Today InformationWeek: "For months, I've been trying to get Microsoft to answer a few questions about the Unix technologies in its intellectual property portfolio. Microsoft agreed to an interview, then backed out "
Source: Linux Today DesktopLinux: "It's good news, bad news situation when it comes to Adobe's new Flash player for Linux "
Source: Linux Today The Inquirer: "Seagate has issued a workaround for Linux users who want to use its Free Agent drives "
Source: Linux Today internetnews.com: "Six months ago, Linux vendor Red Hat acquired the closed source Exadel Studio Pro IDE and pledged to turn it into a fully open source Red Hat product "
Source: Linux Today Linux.com: "Navicron develops cell phone software on Linux, because the open source platform allows for 'more combinations' of the applications that cell phone manufacturers ask for "
Source: Linux Today TechieMoe: "Some of my most interesting suggestions have tended to come from either LinuxForums or random email feedback I get from my site. Pioneer Linux came to me via the latter "
Source: Linux Today LinuxDevices: " [A] lesser known, broad-based consortium has published what it hopes can serve as an actual standard for Linux-based phones "
Source: Linux Today Linuxseekers: "Like its standard Zenwalk Linux edition, the live CD also comes with a broad spectrum of applications but without the bloat "
Source: Linux Today Phoronix: "For this article we had went back and built from source the past seven WINE releases to date "
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News for nerds, stuff that matters
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Source: Slashdot: Linux narramissic writes "Google's Android may be getting all the headlines, but the venerable LiPS (Linux Phone Standards Forum), which launched to much fanfare in 2005, is rolling out the specs. The group, comprised of companies including Orange, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Access, announced Monday that it has completed the first release of its mobile Linux specification, adding components including APIs for telephony, messaging, calendar, instant messaging, and presence functions, as well as new user interface components."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot: Linux Peter writes "Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman and ITWire have praised KDE and KOffice developers for taking a principled stand against OOXML, while raising serious concerns about the GNOME Foundation's decision to give credibility to Microsoft's broken format. This comes on the heels of GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza's depiction of OOXML as a 'superb standard', and GNOME Foundation director Quim Gil's stonewalling of the patent-free Ogg Vorbis / Theora format on behalf of Nokia. Will the GNOME Foundation's indifferent response to Richard Stallman's appeal drive him to throw his weight behind KDE?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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The O'Reilly Network ONLamp Articles and Weblogs
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Source: ONLamp.com I was in Silicon Valley last week, and caught part of a demo of Composition on Rails. This is a project within SAP built on top of SAP NetWeaver Composition
Environment.
I decided to change my plans, and had lunch with Will Gardella and his
team. (Will gave the demo, and his team is building Composition on Rails
within SAP.)
I’d never considered SAP or its business very interesting, because I
misunderstood what SAP actually does. Though I very happily left the world
of the Enterprise (twice, first as a system adminstrator and then as a
consultant who wrote and maintained business software), and though SAP’s
choice of technologies (ABAP, Java, WSDL, WS-*, shared-everything) are
different from my preferences, it took just a few minutes for Will’s demo
to convince me that I had overlooked something very interesting.
At lunch, I said something like “I’m sure you see a lot of business
processes in plenty of industries, where they’re different and where
they’re similar.” Someone responded that SAP finds that hidden knowledge
and extracts the similarites and any customization points.
Suppose I write software to model an ice cream booth. I’ll model with
products, with customers, with a menu, with a payment system, and so on.
The result will be a sufficiently accurate model of the business of selling
ice cream and an example of a food-service business.
My next task is to model a high-end restaurant. There will be
similarities to the ice cream stand — inventory, menus, payment — but
there will be differences, including tables and zones, extra wait staff,
cooks, and more.
My final task is to model a catering service. By the time I finish this
model, I probably know enough to generalize about how all food service
businesses work. The result won’t necessarily be complete or perfect for
any of those three businesses, but it’s a place to start. It’s the same
principle as once, twice, refactor, applied to business process modeling
rather than source code.
There’s an advantage to having an almost-ready starting point if you
want to create software. That’s why we use frameworks and libraries and
rich APIs. That’s why there’s plenty of money in bespoke software.
Though there’s plenty of money in customizing this software, part of the
value proposition to adopting business process software is the
integration of other software. If I can make use of other
well-understood business processes such as accounting and payroll and
employee management, I can provide very useful software to all three
businesses. That is, if you install SAP’s CRM, you can integrate it with
their ERP, and their dashboards and portals, and so on.
All of this software has to interoperate. Historically, this was through
a wad of code in shared libraries that SAP calls BAPI. That still works
(remember, enterprise software lasts a long time between upgrades, much to
the chagrin of developers and vendors), but there’s also a SOA
system in recent versions.
Go ahead and wince at the thought of debugging SOAP and WSDL. I’ve done
it myself. Note the past tense; I’ll personally use REST and APP and
similar systems myself the next time I need that kind of interoperability,
but this architecture can work.
It’s also the opportunity for Composition on Rails.
SOA and WS-* are big. They’re really big. They’re complex, and it’s
difficult to manage that complexity with simplicity. Choosing SOA and WS-*
bounds the scope of any potential solutions to a specific minimum level of
complexity.
If you need to solve really big problems, that complexity may be an
advantage — it may even be necessary.
The first time anyone who’d ever deployed a J2EE application saw the
Ruby on Rails screencast, they likely thought “Wow, you can write a very
basic single-table CRUD application faster than I can deploy my WAR files!”
Not every problem is really, really big and not every problem is really
really complex. Far fewer problems are as complex as we make them.
Given the complexity of ERP or CRM and every other interoperating TLA, I
also understand the desire for a service registry and an efficient and
decoupled enterprise bus. There’s complexity of administration and
interoperability, and business analysts and software developers and
software integration consultants. Modeling how you actually do your
business and make your money and interact with customers and suppliers and
employees means writing software more complex than a bare-bones weblog.
It’ll take more than fifteen minutes, but that’s fine.
However.
If you have already installed and configured and customized this
software, with services registered and running and discoverable behind
appropriate access controls, you have an amazing opportunity that you can’t
replicate with manual, paper-based practices. People can glue together
services and components and queries to make their own applications and
solve their own problems themselves.
That is what I appreciate about Composition on Rails. There’s
still a learning curve to to know which services are available and to
discover their properties before gluing them together. Building an
application isn’t as easy as making a flow-chart and connecting each little
box to another little box with an arrow and pressing Deploy. You must still
write code.
However, writing a little Groovy that connects to the entire cloud gives
you almost as much of the power as writing a full application against all
of the official APIs with much of the ease as drawing pretty pictures. If I
needed a small application to correlate book sales by language with regions
of North America, I could write it in a couple of afternoons without
begging our IT department to prioritize or schedule or spec it.
There are reasonable questions about who should be able to do this and
service level agreements and resource intensive questions and access
controls. Consider them. Still, I’m all for anything that moves power away
from the high priests of computing to the rest of us, to improve everyone’s
life and work.
I asked some probing questions between bites of lunch. They chose Groovy
as it’s a decent language built on the JVM with some simplifications and
better abstractions than Java, while following the Java language model.
Strong Eclipse integration helps; it’s a foundational technology for SAP
NetWeaver. JRuby and Jython are probably right out, for the near future.
Due to the way SAP’s enterprise portal software works, they had to make
some changes to the standard Groovy on Grails view system, at least for the
current releases.
Basically, it’s early software still under development.
(During the demo, I asked a question about the separation of concerns in
the view and controller classes. Will looked at me and said, “You must be
chromatic. We should do lunch.”)
You likely won’t get official support from SAP for building applications
with Composition on Rails any time soon. Don’t let that stop you. Their
traditional model of building big, powerful, vertically-scaled application
stacks communicating in a service cloud won’t go away, but there’s plenty
of room for smaller, targeted applications written in agile languages such
as Groovy, or Python, or Perl, or PHP, or Ruby to emerge and grow and prove
their utility.
I feel a little silly for thinking that a large middleware company like
SAP wouldn’t ever think about building applications in a more agile way,
but I’m glad to admit that I was wrong. Here’s to finding new ways to
simplify our software and to build useful things.
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The latest content from IBM developerWorks
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Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library No matter what combination of technologies you prefer to work with as a Web
developer, Eclipse is a single integrated development environment (IDE) that can
increase your productivity. In Part 1 of this three-part series, you saw how the latest release of Eclipse -- Europa -- can be used to rapidly develop Java Web applications. In this tutorial, Part 2, we'll see how easy it is to develop PHP applications using a different set of Eclipse plug-ins, collectively known as the PHP Development Toolkit (PDT.)
Source: developerWorks : Open source : Technical library The Rich Client Platform (RCP) is a powerful platform technology to build
enterprise applications. With the help of Rich Ajax Platform (RAP), it gets more
interesting because you can reuse
your existing code base and development skills for a Web application, as you saw in Part
1 of this "Rich Client Platform" series. Additionally, RAP has some noteworthy features,
making Web development even more attractive. The article goes beyond the Hello World
example, and explains some key concepts and how to use advanced features provided by RAP.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library The previous installment
of this series introduced you to Ajax development by walking through the practical information
essential for getting an Ajax-enabled environment up and running. In this article, Part 2 of the series, the authors put
your newly gained knowledge into practice by starting the development of a simple Dojo and Atom-based blog reader.
Source: developerWorks : Web development : Technical library It takes some finesse to make the best use of asynchronous callbacks for
Ajax data sources in JavaScript applications. This tip discusses
why you should use asynchronous callbacks for Ajax data sources and
gives examples of coordinating the readiness of mutually dependent
application data sources that may become ready at undefined times
with asynchronous calls.
Source: developerWorks : Linux : Technical library This three-part series illustrates a
hardware-resource-focused form of software virtualization known as container
virtualization (or operating system virtualization), demonstrated through the open
source project OpenVZ. The series provides a comprehensive overview of all the
components and techniques needed to virtualize the Cell/B.E. processor with software
methods. This first article of the series discusses the basic concepts
involved, illustrates the salient points of the OpenVZ and Cell/B.E. architectures
and how they work together, and describes some of the OpenVZ tools.
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