Atlantic Linux Blog

No power? No problem!

Came across this nice story of someone living off of the grid in Scotland while still running a pretty well serviced network. I’d love to see what an equivalent Windows Server based environment would cost in terms of power.

The author makes a good point that what some people chose to view as a disadvantage of open source based systems – that you can choose many different components for an open source system and that you can configure them in a myriad of ways – is, for at least some environments, very much an advantage. I tend to agree. While I like to create homogenous, documented environments for my customers – I do tailor each of those environments to my customers’ requirements – rather than trying to change their processes and workflows to suit the software (an all too common problem which occurs when deploying entirely proprietary systems).

Tags: linux, low power, off grid

Maven Hello World

I’ve been looking at Maven (2.0) recently as part of my work with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) . In the past, most projects I’ve worked on used Apache Ant which works pretty well. Maven is a lot more complex than Ant (see some of its features in What is Maven?) but can be used as a “better Ant” if that’s all you need/want (and it seems like a sensible way to start moving to Maven).

Three things I like about Maven from the start:

1. Maven includes support for managing dependencies allowing your project to automatically specify what 3rd party JARs it depends on and automatically downloading those at compile-time rather than requiring other developers to spend time hunting for these applications.
2. Maven espouses the idea of convention over configuration for its configuration. This is great, in essence, Maven tries to provide sensible defaults as much as possible so you can use it with the minimum of configuration/effort. If you don’t like these conventions, you can change them, but for the casual user, the effort required to start using the tool is low. This is a great approach, all software should strive to be easy to start using (while catering for the power users by enabling the engine to be tweaked if you want to get your hands dirty under the hood).
3. Related to the previous point, it’s remarkably easy to build a new Hello World application (a good smoke test for tools like this). Likemvn archetype:generate -DarchetypeGroupId=org.apache.maven.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-webapp -DgroupId=ie.atlanticlinux -DartifactId=HelloWorld

   to create a new project and
   
mvn package

   to build a test WAR file which you can just drop into your Tomcat webapps directory and immediately test.

Tags: ant, build, java, maven, maven2

The future of Atlantic Linux

Atlantic Linux was a trading name of Applepie Solutions Ltd until the end of 2008. In January, 2009, Atlantic Linux was relaunched as an independent business. We will continue on our core mission of delivering pragmatic, reliable, expert Linux support and consulting. We continue to work with both the free Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu distributions as well as the commercial distributions Red Hat® Enterprise Linux and Novell/SuSE Linux (for which we act as resellers).

Our core mission continues to be helping businesses reduce their overall business costs while improving the effectiveness of their IT infrastructure with smart use of Linux and other open source software technologies.