Put simply, Puppet is a system for automating system administration tasks. To learn more, read our big picture overview of Puppet, or take a deeper look at what Puppet can do with the Puppet Introduction. There's also an about Puppet page which gives the highlights of Puppet's functionality.
SmartFrog is a powerful and flexible Java-based software framework for configuring, deploying and managing distributed software systems.
SmartFrog helps you to encapsulate and manage systems so they are easy to configure and reconfigure, and so that that they can be automatically installed, started and shut down. It provides orchestration capabilities so that subsystems can be started (and stopped) in the right order. It also helps you to detect and recover from failures.
Such systems typically have multiple software components running across a network of computing resources, where the components must work together to deliver the functionality of the system as a whole. It's critical that the right components are running in the right places, that the components are individually and collectively correctly configured, and that they are correctly combined to create the complete system. This profile fits many of the services and applications that run on today's computing infrastructures.
SmartFrog consists of:
A Language for defining configurations, providing powerful system modelling capabilities and an expressive notation for describing system configurations
A secure, distributed Runtime System for deploying software components and managing running software systems
A Library of SmartFrog Components that implement the SmartFrog component model and provide a wide range of services and functionality
Java applications are typically deployed in multiple environments and platforms, each requiring some unique configuration. JFig gives developers a simple yet powerful tool to manage their applications’ configuration. It allows them to:
1. Store application configuration in one common repository of XML files
2. Access configuration data using one common, convenient interface
3. Easily define multiple configurations, dynamically modifying those variables that need to change in different situations
4. Eliminate the error prone practice of defining the same configuration variables in multiple locations
5. Ease the management, deployment, and control of configuration files
Finally a useful article on eclipse.ini memory settings: "Many users seem to have problems with running out of memory when using Eclipse 3.2 in combination with additonal plugins such as those from JBoss Tools or even Eclipse WTP."
COLUMBUS is a collection of programs for high-level ab initio molecular electronic structure calculations. The programs are designed primarily for extended multi-reference (MR) calculations on electronic ground and excited states of atoms and molecules.
Simple is a high performance XML serialization and configuration framework for Java. Its goal is to provide an XML framework that enables rapid development of XML configuration and communication systems. This framework aids the development of XML systems with minimal effort and reduced errors. It offers full object serialization and deserialization, maintaining each reference encountered. In essence it is similar to C# XML serialization for the Java platform, but offers additional features for interception and manipulation.
This mini-HowTo assumes that you’re running Debian Unstable (Sid), but it should also work if you’re using Testing or even Ubuntu. It also assumes you’re doing all these steps as root.
Java applications are typically deployed in multiple environments and platforms, each requiring some unique configuration. JFig gives developers a simple yet powerful tool to manage their applications’ configuration. It allows them to:
1. Store application configuration in one common repository of XML files
2. Access configuration data using one common, convenient interface
3. Easily define multiple configurations, dynamically modifying those variables that need to change in different situations
4. Eliminate the error prone practice of defining the same configuration variables in multiple locations
5. Ease the management, deployment, and control of configuration files
jConfig is an extremely helpful utility, arming the developer with a simple API for the management of properties. Parts of the implementation are based on the idea that Properties, from Java's perspective, are a good thing, but can be better. jConfig employs the use of XML files for storing and retrieving of property information. The information can be stuffed into nice categories, which makes management quite a bit simpler. The ability to load from a URL is also a nice feature. It allows for a central repository where multiple instances of jConfig can read a single file. The nifty ability to
switch between XML and Properties files isn't fully exploited yet, but will be coming soon. That will mean that the developer would take their existing Properties files and export them to XML. That means less time to get up and get going with jConfig.
With jConfig we hope to have provided the developer with another powerful accessory for his or her's toolbox.
It is currently common to build a number of releases from a single code base. For example, a development release, a QA release, a production release and perhaps customer-specific releases. However, these releases seem to differ mostly in the contents of their XML configuration files, and then only very little. Maintaining all these slightly different configuration files is a real nuisance.
XConf was created to simplify this maintenance. Its fundamental premise is that a single development-release (or production-release) configuration file is created and maintained, and is processed by XConf at either build or deployment time into an appropriate release by applying one or more XML-based scripts. Each script contains only the differences required to create the appropriate release, thus removing the need for the mass duplication of configuration files.
This is not really a new solution, since XSLT has been used in the past to do this quite successfully, but XPath can get a little arcane, and maintaining transformation scripts using XSLT can become really complex very quickly. XConf uses a very simple and compact method of specifying elements that need to be processed, and provides some very useful constructs to make transformations painless.
Chef is a systems integration framework, built to bring the benefits of configuration management to your entire infrastructure. With Chef, you can:
* Manage your servers by writing code, not by running commands. (via Cookbooks)
* Integrate tightly with your applications, databases, LDAP directories, and more. (via Libraries)
* Easily configure applications that require knowledge about your entire infrastructure ("What systems are running my application?" "What is the current master database server?")
Puppet is a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it, and a library for realizing the configuration.
Rather than approaching server management by automating current techniques, Puppet reframes the problem by providing a language to express the relationships between servers, the services they provide, and the primitive objects that compose those services. Rather than handling the detail of how to achieve a certain configuration or provide a given service, Puppet users can simply express their desired configuration using the abstractions they’re used to handling, like service and node, and Puppet is responsible for either achieving the configuration or providing the user enough information to fix any encountered problems.
Simple is a high performance XML serialization and configuration framework for Java. Its goal is to provide an XML framework that enables rapid development of XML configuration and communication systems. This framework aids the development of XML systems with minimal effort and reduced errors. It offers full object serialization and deserialization, maintaining each reference encountered. In essence it is similar to C# XML serialization for the Java platform, but offers additional features for interception and manipulation.
NWChem is an electronic structure package that features MC-SCF, MPn, CC, CI, and DFT methods. Properties, solvation models, QM/MM, and MD simulations are also possible.
jConfig is an extremely helpful utility, arming the developer with a simple API for the management of properties. Parts of the implementation are based on the idea that Properties, from Java's perspective, are a good thing, but can be better. jConfig employs the use of XML files for storing and retrieving of property information. The information can be stuffed into nice categories, which makes management quite a bit simpler. The ability to load from a URL is also a nice feature. It allows for a central repository where multiple instances of jConfig can read a single file. The nifty ability to
switch between XML and Properties files isn't fully exploited yet, but will be coming soon. That will mean that the developer would take their existing Properties files and export them to XML. That means less time to get up and get going with jConfig.
With jConfig we hope to have provided the developer with another powerful accessory for his or her's toolbox.
Changing Log4j logging levels dynamically
Simple problem and may seem oh-not-so-cool. Make the log4j level dynamically configurable. You should be a able to change from DEBUG to INFO or any of the others. All this in a running application server.
R. Popp, D. Montana, R. Gassner, G. Vidaver, and S. Iyer. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics, 3, page 2184--2189. San Diego, CA USA, IEEE, (11-14 October 1998)
K. Frühauf, and A. Zeller. Proc. Int'l Symp. Software Configuration Management (SCM), volume 1675 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, page 217--227. Springer-Verlag, (1999)
Z. du Liu, X. dang Cheng, and H. sheng Liao. Education Technology and Computer Science (ETCS), 2010 Second International Workshop on, 1, page 602-605. (March 2010)
M. Nieke, C. Seidl, and S. Schuster. Proceedings of the Tenth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-intensive Systems, page 73--80. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2016)