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.
2 Comments | 
OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: apache, Berlin, Deutschland, Germany, host, puppet, virtual | 
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Posted by Clement Escoffier
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).
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
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.
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
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
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
The Play! Framework offers a new way to develop web applications. Relying on a stateless model, a light but complete stack and no big turnaround times for debugging, Play! makes developing Scala applications really efficient. akquinet is using Play! in several projects. But, what makes Play! even better and your development even more efficient is the Scala support. You can develop your application using the Scala language.
This blog post explains how to set up Play! and your development environment to develop web applications efficiently. It covers the Play framework and the Scala module installation, the integration inside the Eclipse IDE, the Source Code Management configuration and the deployment into Apache Tomcat and JBoss AS.
2 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: application server, Berlin, deployment, Deutschland, Germany, scala | Permalink
Posted by Robert Magnus
Scala is starting to be really popular, and there are many reasons why you might like to use it in your current projects. At akquinet we’re now using Scala inside Java applications to reduce the amount of written code and to benefit from Scala’s flexibility. However, integrating Java and Scala in the same application requires some tricks. Using Java classes in Scala is pretty straightforward; however, using Scala classes in Java is not.
Scala has several language features which cannot be directly mapped to Java, for example function types and traits. Here we will describe how these language features are compiled to Java byte code and how to access them from Java afterwards.
1 Comment | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Berlin, Deutschland, Germany, integration, Java, scala, traits, unit | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
Play! is an open-source framework for building web applications in Java or Scala. It is stateless and promotes RESTfulness: it embraces web-oriented architecture. But best of all, Play is simple, fast and ultimately fun. It is also pretty powerful and allows the development of sophisticated web applications in an efficient way. akquinet is now using Play as the basis for different applications.
To illustrate how easy and powerful Play is, this blog post presents a miniature web application.
It’s a basic library interface, where books may be checked out and returned at the press of a button. Then, the page reloads and the updated availability status is shown.
The following is just a small sample of what Play can do. Play is a sophisticated framework with many other features that we don’t have room to represent here (such as excellent support for testing, the ability to configure dynamic routing to create clean, RESTful URLs, and access to a wide variety of modules such as user authentication), but the intention of this post is simply to show how Play can enable you to build powerful web applications quickly and easily.
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Leave a Comment » | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: Berlin, CRUD, Deutschland, Germany, JPA, MVC, play!, playframework, web | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
When building applications for specific domains, we often face a more and more important issue: how do I build the runtime required by the application? For enterprise applications, JEE application servers provide a technical stack containing all required services, but for desktop applications, or communication gateways there are no all-in-one solutions. Indeed, the runtime must fit to the environment and application requirements, making it complex to achieve in a flexible way.
akquinet launched the OW2 Chameleon project in 2009. Chameleon provides a way to build OSGi-based runtimes including the required services and your application. This article explains the motivations behind Chameleon and how Chameleon makes our software development more flexible, robust and efficient.
1 Comment | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: osgi, iPOJO, SOA, service, ow2, chameleon, adaptability, flexibility | Permalink
Posted by Clement Escoffier
The previous post of the Android Activities and Tasks series explained the concept of Android’s intents. We have seen how to use them to launch activities and how to utilize intent flags to customize the behavior of the launch to our needs.
In this post, we focus on activities themselves and explain the properties we can set on an activity or task to influence the activity launch behavior on the receiver side. In detail:
5 Comments | All, OSGi and Mobile Solutions | Tagged: activities, activity, android, intent, mobile, task, tasks | Permalink
Posted by Philipp Kumar
