Open Source Development

Open source platforms are great assets that continuously develop for our benefit. Researches show that, over the years, the open source adoption has increased thanks to investments in its related technologies. These days, there are enterprises acquiring important benefits from the license issue, flexibility and quality of it. As well, we have to consider the tremendous advantages resulted for entire human society.

Open Source Topics

There are many topics and I am going to present some of the most important ones, as:

• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) features standards for services and technologies, allowing to this software, together with other applications, to function on scalable, secure and reliable platforms. It empowers you to set or unset the software, hardware, applications and architecture that will respect your own business’s guidelines.

• Open Source Software (OSS) protects the code with a license named GNU, one of the GPL type (a general license, for public use) and it allows anyone to access the code. This means that none owns it and anyone can see it, learn or even make changes on it, so there are no monopolistic actions. This aspect helps us to find “bugs” faster and eliminate them, switch between vendors without locking systems and more.

• The relation between OSS and SOA is developing gradually. These technologies involve users and developers to help the open source to grow. The developers provide improved development platforms, as well, techniques, standards and tools through usage of knowledge and technical expertise. Thanks to these efforts, the open source is developed through the program Red Hat, for and of developers.

• Virtualization isolates the OS (Operating System) from hardware. There are many OS, which run on one computer and different loads can be moved or combined. Virtualization allows you to change the hardware without doing a reset of the software, move different workloads from one server to another, fully control access to your data, and manipulate the power and capacity, having a secure space to test and work. This feature helps you to have lower costs through the optimization of the system (charging the utilization per total hardware and not per any single OS running on your computer).

• Red Hat is an acquisition of JBoss Application Server and it is one of the best application sets. It belongs to middleware technologies.

• One important Red Hat feature: System Tap helps administrators and developers to examine Linux activity. Resulting data is separated, than extracted, and, in the end, summarized to diagnose the system’s problems.

• JBoss console is one of the most known consoles is ON type (Operating Network) that presents a platform for updating, monitoring, administering and inventorying applications. Updating, we all know what it stands for. Monitoring is a module that helps us, along with OS, to monitor the platform’s functions and check for lately updates and band problems, identifying the sources and the history of any fault. Administration is using functions that control the system. Controlled functions are start, re-start and stop across the whole platform or on specific applications. This module allows you to schedule the operations for a later date or to rollback, whenever necessary. The next module, inventory, empowered you to catalog servers as Apache Tomcat, JBoss, services as data sources and IT platforms as Linux, Solaris, Windows. All these can be installed automatically or manually, and usually provide the newest versions.

In addition, we can discuss many topics, as Red Hat Road Map, Cluster Suite, Lowering TCO, Red Hat Global File System and more. All of them help us to fully benefit from the permanent development of these open source platforms.

Software development has been defined as the process of analyzing needs, designing solutions, writing programs, testing them, and implementing them to solve problems for individuals and organizations. Over the years different models have been used in software development (software development lifecycles, SDLC). Some of these are Waterfall, Spiral, Iterative or incremental and Agile.

Agile software Development is the model that is increasingly being used by developers these days, Ambler(n.d.) defines it as “An iterative and incremental (evolutionary) approach to software development which is performed in a highly collaborative manner by self-organizing teams within an effective governance framework with “just enough” ceremony that produces high quality software in a cost effective and timely manner  which meets the changing needs of its stakeholders.” The values that are embedded in this model are: giving precedence to Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, Customer collaboration over contract negotiation and responding to change over following a plan.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) can improve the agility of business operations. Developers create services in the service layer, which have published interfaces supporting a particular business domain. Using the SOA approach in combination with component based approach to software development; companies can reap a lot of benefits. Some of these benefits might include: Better return on investment, mobility of code, focused developer roles as applications will have multiple layers and each layer would need a specific developer role (e.g. A client developer would need to know technologies such as SWING, JSP or MFC), higher security level, better testing leading to fewer defects, reusability, support for multiple client types, better scalability etc (Stevens,n.d.).

Cloud computing is another technology that has excited the tech world. Experts believe that cloud computing can provide a lot of benefits to testing and development of software. Cloud Computing can be defined as anything that involves delivering hosting services over the internet. This includes many areas of technology like software as a service, hardware as a service etc. One of the main advantages of cloud computing is that the provider hosts the software on the internet and the customer access only that which is needed and pays for that part.  Examples of companies providing software on demand are Salesforce.com (CRM), Google (GOOG), NetSuite (N), Taleo (TLEO), Concur Technologies (CNQR) etc.

Virtualization is being increasingly used by software developers to stream the development process. They use these tools to provide different target environments for development and testing for e.g., using different operating system, operating system versions and browsers. One of the main advantages is that developers can spend time on the actual testing rather than wasting time on creating and setting up test environments. One of the tools being used by Microsoft for this purpose is Microsoft Hyper-V.

The trend of Open Source Software development is also increasing as opposed to proprietary software. With Open Source code the software must be available for free and anyone should be able to download the source code. Being easily available makes it easy to modify the source code and make it adaptable to changing environments; this also makes the software more sustainable. Non-reliance on one entity also makes it feasible for the software to be modified by another party if the original developers abandon it. For open source code, developers are moving towards the usage of dynamic languages like JavaScript and PHP and relying less on static languages like C, C++ and Java. These languages are more flexible and easier to write in. Better software development and unit testing procedures have made the use of dynamic languages easier.

Reference List

Ambler S.W., (n.d.). Disciplined Agile Software Development: Definition. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileSoftwareDevelopment.htm

Ambler S.W., (n.d.). Examining the Agile Manifesto. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.agilemodeling.com/essays/agileSoftwareDevelopment.htm

SearchCloudComputing.com.(2009).Defintion. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://searchcloudcomputing.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid201_gci1287881,00.html

Stevens,M.,.(n.d.). The Benefits of a Service-Oriented Architecture.Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://www.developer.com/tech/article.php/1041191

UAE Hosting.(2009).Advantages of cloud computing. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://contactdubai.com/webhosting/advantages-of-cloud-computing

Gonzalez-Barahona ,J.M.(2000).Advantages of open source software. Retrieved August 23, 2009 from http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Advantages_open_source_soft.html