Open source Tag

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is an enterprise web content management system that, like many other enterprise applications, is a complex piece of software to set up and configure. We can't eliminate this complexity completely, but we can reduce it for many use-cases. AEM OpenCloud is an open source project being led by Shine Solutions that automates the setup of a complete ready-to-use AEM environment in the cloud within 15 minutes. However, testing and verifying that an AEM installation is working correctly is laborious and time-consuming. Done manually, testing can certainly take longer than the 15 minutes required to actually build the environment in the first place. Fortunately, automated testing was identified early on in the project as an important part of OpenCloud's modular design, as is made clear by this diagram created by Cliff Subagio, one of the project founders: AEM OpenCloud suite However, it's one thing to say that testing is important, it's another thing to actually do it. In this post I'll talk about why and how we used InSpec to implement automated testing in OpenCloud.

OSDC2013 and WDS2013 back to back

Last week, I had the opportunity to attend two conferences back to back: Open Source Developer’s Conference 2013 in Auckland, and Web Directions South 2013 in Sydney. Being in a profession where I am sitting in front of a desk all day, going on the road for a week mixed things up quite a bit. Plus, preparing to talk at one added to the stress, and to the lack of sleep. What a great experience though, I have been put through an accelerated learning curve on a diverse range of topics. They ranged from the very technical, such as dissecting the GPU’s role in rendering CSS using layers; to the more fun, such as how to generate a choose-you-own-adventure game in pastebin; to the unexpected such as a crash course on 3D modelling using Blendr.

ren_and_stimpy_by_buttercupnergal

“In our (admittedly limited) experience, Redis is so fast that the slowest part of a cache lookup is the time spent reading and writing bytes to the network” - stackoverflow.com

Can Databases Be Exciting To Work With?

It’s very rare that a project can cause an engineer to get excited about the prospect of working with a database they've never worked with previously, especially when it’s a relational one. That mainly boils down to the fact that the majority of them are clunky monstrosities that are painfully slow and cause us to grimace at the thought of having to integrate them into our applications, not to mention having to piece together gnarly and over engineered SQL statements.