Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Impact of ESB (Enterprise Service Bus)


Today's tech explosive I would like to discuss is on how an ESB could make an impact in your web life. Last few days I had the opportunity of getting hands on experience with this software architecture model which I found throughly amazing and really cool.

What is an ESB?

The first question I had when I kept my hand on the ESB was, what is this all about ? Based on the experience I got through tampering with this software architecture, ESB plays a major role in large enterprise systems.

When an enterprises work flaw is massive and complicated having an Independent system working in isolation is not practical. Therefore, the work should be delegated among different systems which should compose a distributed system architecture. Having number of systems itself would not be adequate, the fact is apparent that there should be a middle man that should link each of these systems together and maintain connectivity between them. ESB becomes the life saver at this point.

Example use of an ESB

To elaborate more on the potential of ESB let me take a real world scenario where ESB becomes a life saver. Let's take a scenario of a house hold bugler alarm system. During an intrusion the following procedure should happen concurrently.

  • An intrusion message should be sent to the house owner's mobile device
  • Authorities (Police) should be notified
  • The alarm company should be notified
The above scenario involves integration and communication among three main systems. This integration can be successfully accomplished through an ESB.

WSO2 ESB

The above discussed is one main scenario that an ESB offers to its clients. There's much more capability that it can do such as load balancing and providing fail over support, task scheduling, message processing and much more. WSO2 ESB is an open source light weight ESB which I found really fascinating. More information can be referred from http://wso2.com/products/enterprise-service-bus/.

I encourage you all to try it for yourself. It's grate and you won't regret it.

Sunday, September 9, 2012

Setting up Terminals: Developer Friendly Environment


Working with terminals is quite interesting and quite straight forward , today's tech explosive I encountered was on configuring the Ubuntu (perhaps will be applicable for almost all the linux tools) terminal for quick access and for swift development. These are some of the additional softwares and steps which can be used for interactive terminal configuration.

Running Multiple Terminals Simultaneously

Terminator is an interactive tool which will allow multiple terminals function at the same time. More information on this tool can be refereed from http://www.apt-get.co.uk/apt_get_terminator.html.

In summary the tool can be download from execution of the command  'apt-get install terminator' 
in the Ubuntu console.

Smooth Navigation

Navigation between the directories from the terminal can be quite a tedious task for quite lengthy directory structures. 'nautilus-open-terminal' is an interesting tool which will allow a user to open the terminal from a navigated directory, simply through right clicking the mouse and opening up the terminal. More information of the tool can be refereed from http://www.linuxnix.com/2010/01/ubuntu-right-click-to-open-a-terminal.html.

The application can be downloaded 'apt-get install nautilus-open-terminal'once downloaded re start the machine.

Simultaneous Action with Smooth Navigation

As discussed through the above topics, for a developer friendly environment it requires integration of both the features. The good news is that is it's possible !
This can be done through installation of a package nautilus-actions by execution of sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions After the installation run configuration tool nautilus-actions-config-tool Once the configuration is executed add new item, Name it "Open with Terminator..." In the command tab
full path : /usr/bin/terminator
parameters : --working-directory=%d/%b

Then logout and login.. You are good to go !
More information can be referred from http://askubuntu.com/questions/76712/setting-nautilus-open-terminal-to-launch-terminator-rather-than-gnome-terminal