Open Source Daily Guide

In an interview with Open Enterprises, Director of Engineering at Hewlett Packard’s Open Source and Linux Organization, says that the company will invest in new Open Source services to support lifecycle and governance. This is a good example of Enterprise support for open source platforms.

Over the past 6 years, HP has developed internal processes and best practices for open source governance and we’re developing several services offerings from the HP Services Consulting & Integration group.

… we’re continuing to evolve and improve our Insight Control Linux Edition which is a premier solution for managing our industry standard servers and blades. We also have plans underway to develop stronger linkages between our Linux management solutions and our broader OpenView management solutions from HP Software.

• In no way guess a particular order of execution – thread execution order cannot be established and restricted by the OS scheduler. You cannot predict the sequence of threads flowing from one execution to the next, not even what thread comes next.
• If possible, use thread-local storage – to keep coordination to a minimum, use exclusive memory location.
• For better concurrency, you can change the algorithm – when programmers are given 2 or more choices of algorithm, they can rely on the asymptotic order of execution because it is almost always that the theoretic metric is connected with an application’s operation.

Following these rules, it will be easier to create strong concurrent solutions with less threading problems.

• Plan scalability to get the benefit of the increasing number of cores – write flexible codes that can handle an increase in cores because the more cores you have, the greater the possibility of expansion of data processing.
• Use thread-safe libraries – a hotspot computation can be executed through library call and should use a similar library function rather than a handwritten code. This ensures that library calls are thread-safe even if routines are called from 2 separate threads, you’re sure to get correct answers for both calls.
• Use of right threading model – if there is a need to use user-controlled threads, don’t use the more complex threads.

Creating a multithreaded application requires 4 major steps and of the four, the design and implementation part is not often discussed. The following rules will give you a better chance of writing the best and most useful threaded application:
• Identify accurate independent computations – simultaneous execution is not possible unless the executable similar operations can run independently of one another.
• Concurrent implementation should be at the highest level – during the analysis phase of the threading methodology, identify the hotspots – code segments that require the longest execution time – and if they can run parallel you will be able to get its maximum performance.

The realm of closed systems developed in secrecy with closely guarded algorithms and software engineering may become a thing of the past as with the advent of more and more open-sourced systems being deployed across the internet. Cloud computing is set to be ruled by open-sourced applications, developed by big businesses to cater to commercial and personal users. Even the world’s largest and most secretive companies have begun to develop open-sourced systems(in secret of course), as they may be seeing more than just a trend to allow them to have something in case the world does shift all of a sudden to open source. Read the rest of this entry »

Though people and businesses are benefiting from the many deployed open-sourced programs the world over, security still prevents most from shifting to their use as with big businesses. The many security issues that are inherent of open-systems due to the dispersal of development that may span the globe is quite alarming and without proper measures to address this. Enterprise software have inherent need for strong security and up-time, that is quite opposite of open-source development due to frequent and dispersed support facilities. These factors are deterring some companies from adopting them so more has to be done to address the security issue. Read the rest of this entry »

GlassFish, from Sun Microsystems has just received a much deserved upgrade loading it woth more advanced features adding to it’s already advanced features being one of the computing industry’s most downloaded and used application server. The open-source contains some of the most powerful collection of technologies to come out of the open source industry including OpenESB, OpenMQ, Liferay Portal, SunGlassFish Web Stack and of course the core GlassFish app base. The complete portfolio comes at a price for corporate users but the benefits are way worth their value due to stable operations. Read the rest of this entry »

Mozilla has continued to grow in terms of the numbers of people who have shifted use of their browser, FireFox in place of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer due to one major difference, speed. IE has been known to have very large resource requirements and with the release of the newest version IE8 that is designed to take back some of their customers still has detractors who shift to the open-sourced FireFox. The many other open-sourced browser projects have been slowly but surely taking a bite out of IE’s share of the browser market, with Chrome, Safari and many others taking their fair share. Read the rest of this entry »

Vyatta Community Edition 5 (VC5) user rejoice! Based on the latest news Vyatta is adding intrusion preventors for SSL and VPN in VC5. Also included are features for URL filtering and Web caching.

Open-source routing vendor Vyatta is adding SSL VPN, intrusion prevention, Web caching, URL filtering and other features in Vyatta Community Edition 5 (VC5), the latest version of its software. In VC5, Vyatta supports OpenVPN, an open-source version of SSL VPN (Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network) software. SSL joins IPSec (Internet Protocol Security), PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol) and L2TP (Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol) as VPN alternatives included in the routing platform. Frequently used to secure Web-based transactions, SSL is a relatively lightweight encryption system that works more easily with NAT (Network Address Translation) than do alternatives such as IPSec.

Another positive development for open source. See the whole story here.

The many open-sourced browsers that are wowing users all over the globe are indeed causing shivers down the spine of the much used Internet Explorer from Microsoft. the software giant has suffered blow after blow when it was deemed to be bullying users to use their IE which just happened to be bundled with their Windows OS Read the rest of this entry »