10. January 2012
Let’s imagine the following situation. You’re working on an application for a customer. Despite a firm deadline and a roadmap given to your customer, he’d like to check the progress regularly, let’s say weekly or even daily, and actually give you feedback.
So to make everybody happy, you start releasing the application weekly. However, releasing is generally a hard-core process, even for the most automated processes, and requires human actions. As the release date approaches, stress increases. The tension reaches its climax one hour before the deadline when the release process fails, or worse, when the deployment fails. We’ve all been in situations like that, right?
This all-too-common nightmare can be largely avoided. This blog post presents a way to deal with the above situation using Jenkins, Nexus and SSH. The application is deployed continuously and without human intervention on a test environment, which can be checked and tested by the customer. Jenkins, a continuous integration server, is used as the orchestrator of the whole continuous delivery process.
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3 Comments | 
All, Innovation | Tagged: Berlin, Continuous, Delivery, Deutschland, Germany, hudson, integration, javaEE, jenkins, Maven, nexus, SSH, Tomcat | 
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Posted by Clement Escoffier
6. January 2012
akquinet tech@spree has published a technology radar analyzing the trends of 2011–2012. It provides an overview of the evolution of practice in the Information Technology sector in 2011 as well as a forecast for 2012. It is the result of one year of analysis and synthesis performed by the Innovation department of akquinet tech@spree.
The technology radar captures the output from discussions, experiments, projects, and feedback from customers and developers. It synthesizes the results to inform global technology strategy decisions. It focuses on new technologies and methodologies with a high level of attraction. This document does not aim to provide an in-depth presentation of each technology, focusing instead on conciseness and highlighting the trends and state of the practice.
More information on http://radar.spree.de
Leave a Comment » | All, Enterprise Applications, Innovation, Mobile, User eXperience | Tagged: 2011, 2012, android, Berlin, CDI, css, Deutschland, frameowrk, Germany, html5, ios, javaEE, JBOSS, osgi, play!, prediction, radar, technology, trends, ui | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
26. December 2011
The PicketLink framework[1] provides identity management (IDM)[2] to applications based on different identity providers. PicketLink offers support for a number of different identity store back-ends like LDAP or RDBMSes.
We are successfully using PicketLink in several internal and external applications and it is also a foundation for many other frameworks like seam-security[3] or the GateIn[4] portal server.
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1 Comment | JBOSS AID | Tagged: Berlin, Deutschland, GateIn, Germany, IDM, JBOSS, LDAP, PicketLink | Permalink
Posted by Michael Schuetz
23. November 2011
Puppet is a configuration manager embracing the infrastructure-as-code movement. It allows you to describe the desired configuration of your system. One of the most common tasks for Puppet is to configure an Apache frontend.
This blog post explains how you can use Puppet to configure an Apache server as frontend using the mod_proxy, without having to write a single Apache directive.
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2 Comments | OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: apache, Berlin, Deutschland, Germany, host, puppet, virtual | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
11. November 2011
Overview
Amazons virtual privacy cloud service (VPC) offers great outsourcing possibilities for your less private (but still private) services.
Consider a Jenkins build server. You have got one on your local machine but sometimes it’s just too much load for your hardware. It would be nice in such a case to just push some load into the cloud. Clearly you can not just put a Jenkins server into the cloud because it will need access to various services like at least some repository (Git, SVN). To protect that cloud-internal traffic (you do not want other Amazon customers to see your source code) one should use VPC. And for a seamless integration into your existing infrastructure you will need a VPN tunnel from the Amazon VPC to your local network.
Amazon offers the possibility to create such a VPN connection to your VPC. You may set up your own VPN server in your VPC but in our opinion it is easier and cheaper to use Amazons solution. Because it seemed less pricy we first tried to just use open-source software for that VPN server.
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2 Comments | All, Enterprise Applications | Tagged: Amazon, Berlin, cisco, cloud, Deutschland, ec2, Germany, ipsec, openswan, openvpn, racoon, strongswan, vpc, vpn | Permalink
Posted by Immanuel Sims
9. November 2011
Continuous integration servers have become a corner stone of any professional development environment. By letting a machine integrate and build software, developers can focus on their tasks: fixing bugs and developing new features. With the emergence of trends such as continuous deployment and delivery, the continuous integration server is not limited to integrating your products, but has become a central piece of infrastructure.
However, organizing jobs on the CI server is not always easy.
This blog post describes a couple of strategies for creating dependent tasks with Jenkins (or Hudson).
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7 Comments | All, Innovation, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Berlin, build, continuous delivery, continuous integration, Deutschland, Germany, hudson, jenkins, jobs, join, pipeline, trigger | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
1. November 2011
Our last blog post introduced how Puppet can be used to achieve Infrastructure-As-Code, and how to deploy Play applications following this practice. However, we didn’t address how the applications are actually copied to the host.
Apache Maven is a widely used build tool adopted by more and more companies to support their build process from compilation to deployment. Deploying, in the Maven world, means uploading the artifact to a Maven repository. Such Maven repositories are managed using Sonatype Nexus or JFrog Artifactory. However, this sort of deployment does not address the real provisioning of the application, i.e the deployment on the production servers.
This blog post presents a Puppet module to download Maven artifacts from a Nexus repository. This module closes the gap between the development team deploying their artifacts to a Maven repository, and the administration team responsible for installing and configuring the application.
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5 Comments | All, Innovation, JBOSS AID, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: artifacts, Berlin, continuous delivery, deployment, Deutschland, Germany, infrastructure as code, Maven, nexus, puppet, repository | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
25. October 2011
Puppet is a configuration management tool made to ease the management of your infrastructure by making it more traceable and easier to understand. It allows infrastructure-as-code, a major trend today to deal with the complexity of infrastructure management.
On the other side, Play framework is a promoting a new way to build web applications, making this sort of development more efficient and productive. By avoiding the turn over (compilation-packaging-deployment-navigation) after every change, it makes web development fun again.
This blog post explains how you can deploy your Play applications using Puppet. This allows you to develop web apps in a very productive way and deploy them reliably.
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3 Comments | All, Innovation, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Berlin, deployment, Deutschland, Germany, infrastructure, module, play!, playframework, puppet | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
9. October 2011
Testing OSGi applications and services has always been a difficult challenge. Despite the development of several frameworks such as OPS4J Pax Exam, or junit4osgi, writing tests requires a non-negligible amount of code to manage the OSGi aspect of the test. Indeed, waiting and getting the service under test or releasing the service requires dealing directly with the OSGi framework and so the OSGi API. The OSGi Helper library is a small collection of classes to let tests focus on the behavior to verify instead of drowning the code in the depths of the OSGi development model.
The OSGi Helper library was developed by the Innovation department of akquinet, and was contributed to the OW2 Chameleon project.
This post explains the benefits brought by the library in comparison to plain OSGi tests.
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4 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Berlin, chameleon, Deutschland, exam, Germany, iPOJO, junit, osgi, ow2, pax, test, unit | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
3. August 2011
Seam Forge – a core framework for rapid-application development in a standards-based environment.
Q: Hi Lincoln, thanks for your time. What’s cool about Forge?
A: Hi Michael, thanks for your interest in Forge! Special, that’s a tough one. It’s my project so it all feels a little special, but overall I think there are two big differences we’re going to see with Forge as opposed to other rapid application tools like it. The first is the fact that it is technology agnostic. Sure, it’s written in Java, and it primarily operates on Java projects right now, but it could be used on any technology, support any build tool, and even do things that are completely un-related to web development. I for one, plan on using it’s plugin system to control my home automation system. And that brings me to the other big thing that makes Forge special – the plugins themselves. Plugins are so easy to write that I expect people will be writing plugins for things we couldn’t have possibly imagined.
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2 Comments | All, JBOSS AID | Tagged: FORGE, JBOSS, SEAM | Permalink
Posted by Michael Schuetz
