Surveying the land scape

After spending the obligatory time setting up my java project and being led off in many and varied directions chasing shiny new APIs and tools I have come REST back at Java and Maven.

There are certainly a myriad of new frameworks in the JVM, especially with the inclusion of such a diverse array of new languages like JRuby, Groovy and Scala. In the last few weeks I have kicked the tyres of most of them, and certainly the odd one a good test drive. But at this stage I have decided to stick with the old trusty Java and Maven team.

This is not say I am any worse off for the trip having seen some great ideas, new features and tricks I will surely call upon in the future, however in my case all of the building blocks I need for my RestMS server are all written in Java, and for a basic functional 1.0 will be fine bound together using Java.

The reason for sticking with Maven is just the sheer array of plugins, tools and overall power of this build tool. God knows I fight with it, dodging and weaving through it's more complex areas but at the end of the day it does a lot of shit I just cannot be bothered with, or didn't even think was possible. And all with a small tweak here and sometimes bit of head bashing. This paired with the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants, borrowing ideas from the wide array of large projects already using it makes it quite an attractive path.

In addition to development toolsets is the wide variety of open source hosting environments, with http://sourceforge.net, http://code.google.com and http://github.com to name a few. Having also given them all a try again lately I have selected github.com for my storm-cloud project. I can summarise the reason for this by saying I am amazed by how it is entirely focused on the code, how it is browsed, how it is shared. Their interface for code browsing is much more interactive than the other project sites. This paired with the ability to add a nice welcome page to your project is very cool.

So my new project site is http://github.com/wolfeidau/storm-cloud

I am currently, albeit slowly, chipping away at my todo list, adding structure, function and of course tests :)

Solaris Patching Goodness

I have recently been working on updating a Solaris 10 based server with the latest security patches. As the company I work for is small and the server is working along side a slew of Centos Servers which get FREE updates I needed a simple way to apply the security updates available from Suns Patches and Updates site.

For some time I have just checking the sun public list patch list every once in a while, and applying the important sounding ones manually. This was not a very nice or secure solution.

So recently after some searching I found Patch Check advanced (PCA) which can be found at the PCA Website.

This simple Perl script has made it very simple for me to apply and check for new recommended and security patches published by Sun. I cannot thank the author enough for such a simple and easy to use patching application.

To install just download the latest release using wget at Latest PCA Stable version and copy it to your /usr/local/bin directory. Make this script executable using chmod and then create a directory for your updates, in my /data/softwareupdates.

Once installed we want to check for missing recommended and security patches, to do this we run the following command.

# pca -l mrs

If your happy with that I recommend downloading all these patches first to ensure the patching process is as short as possible. To download the patches you need a FREE sun user ID which you can register for at . To perform the download we run the following command while in /data/softwareupdates directory, this will prompt you for a password.

# pca --user mynewusername -d mrs

Now that we have our patches we can apply them, again passing our username just in case it needs to download something new.

# pca --user mynewusername -i mrs

At this point I reboot the server just to be sure they are all applied.

# sync; sync; reboot

Next I am going to look at modifying the pca script so it can be run from crontab and send an e-mail if there is any new patches to install.