Date: Tue, 11 Jul 2000 17:25:38 -0400
From: "Shane O'Donnell" <shane@www.opennms.org>
Subject: OpenNMS: OpenNMS Update v1.16
To: "General@Opennms. Org" <general@opennms.org>

==================
  OpenNMS Update
==================
 Vol 1., Issue 16
==================

In this week's installment...

  - Project Status
    - Supporting Info on the DB
    - JSDT Concerns
    - Web Site Re-Design
    - Housekeeping (READ THIS!)
    - Coding Projects Underway
  - Viva Las Vegas!
  - The Return of the Wish List!
  - OpenNMS Job Opportunities?!?

==============
Project Status
==============

Supporting Info on the DB:

Not that any of this has any bearing on anything, it's always nice to get
a vote of confidence in your previous decisions...

First off, Tim Perdue at PHPBuilder.com put together this interesting
article squaring MySQL vs Postgres for performance and scalability.
Excellent article, and it looks like we made a good choice for the
Bluebird application. It's available at
    http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000705.php3.

In a posting to the Perl Object Oriented Persistence mailing list
(informally, the "POOP-group"), Michael Schwern pointed some wicked stuff
you can do with Postgres, some of which might even come in handy. He goes
on to mention Postgres' ability to handle multi-dimensional arrays in
tables, table inheritance, and perhaps coolest of all-- the ability to
write stored procedures in Perl.

Call me crazy, but just that last little bit is almost the killer app of
killer apps for the network-savvy Perl hacks...

JSDT Concerns:

Just when you start to make some progress, WHAM!

Well, our period of paranoia earlier may be paying off in full, as we
now have some unanswered questions regarding the future of JSDT, as well
as Sun's plans for licensing it.

If you recall, JSDT is the Java Shared Data Toolkit, which allows for
processes to effectively "register" to communicate with a common data
source. So instead of serially messaging another process, blocking for a
response, and repeating for any other process needing that message, we
write once to JSDT which handles the rest of the process, including the
threading.

Well, it appears that the lead (only (?)) developer has been re-deployed
following his final release of the product last November. There are also
rumblings in newsgroups that the new JSDT release will be binary-only
and sold as an unsupported, yet for-profit product. Hence our concerns.

But as of now, we have no official word that it's going away... nor
official word that it will be around. Our current stance is to put a
temporary moratorium on future JSDT development, pending an authoritative
response, while researching our options to work around this if it becomes
an issue (e.g., licensing changes, price applied, etc.). So is this a
show-stopper? Not by any means, but it certainly is something to watch.

As part of our research, we've dug a little bit into JADE (info available
at http://freshmeat.net/appindex/2000/02/25/951494616.html. It appears to
do a good part of what we need, but it's being held in the wings until we
know we need it.

Any experience with JADE? How about an inside track on JSDT info from Sun
(or happen to know someone at Sun and can find something out on the QT...)?
Any help is appreciated! Thanks!!

Web-Site Redesign:

Since I can't announce anything today, I won't. But rest assured, I've seen
the new web site and I must say that for somebody that doesn't know PHP,
Steve does some pretty wicked stuff with it.

The new site should be on-line by the end of the week and will include some
new content as well as improved navigability (Score 10 points for use of
that word).

Housekeeping (READ THIS!):

I dig the mailing list business, but let's keep a few basic things in mind:

 - The "general" list is a big list with over 1000 subscribers. If you
   think that most of that group are interested in what you have to say
   and it's relevant to the project, mail to the list. But make sure
   you've contemplated your actions before you do.

 - There are other, focused lists. Review the list and consider if
   your topic isn't more appropriate for one of them.

 - If you change email addresses or ISPs, please unsubscribe first.
   I get about 30 emails daily that are undeliverable for one reason
   or another. Please help me out on this one!

 - If for any reason you've stopped getting emails from the list
   (or never have), check and see if you are a "lost soul", my list
   of email addresses that were returned as undeliverable. If so and
   you just fat-fingered something, let me know and I'll correct it.

   You can check out the list at http://www.opennms.org/lostsouls.txt.

 - Also, note that we don't publish your email addresses on the web
   site so web crawlers can't find them and start spamming you. I find
   it terribly funny that we are now publishing a list of undeliverable
   email addresses. Here's hoping that every web crawler in the world
   finds it multiple times...

And with that, I descend my soapbox. Thanks for your help!


Coding Projects Underway:

  - Event Subsystem -- Underway. Rick's currently working on multi-threading
    eventd, building a TCP event receiver, and collaborating with Doug on
    the event correlator design.

    Note: There is some COOL stuff going on on the events front. Subscribe
    to the "events" list to keep up--if you can!

  - ICMPD in Perl -- Progress reported, with an effort to get some of the
    C code underlying the Net::RawIP module ported to Solaris.

  - Service Control Manager -- Spec nearing completion. This is Weave's
    baby. Think of it as a flexible and easily extensible PostMaster
    Daemon (pmd, for you OV/TME folks...)

  - capsd -- Sowmya's submitted her code for review and testing.
    Currently functional for a non-distributed implementation. Working
    on the data mappings for the DB tables.

===============
Viva Las Vegas!
===============

Looks like we've got a trip to Vegas on the books, so if you are a
Vegasian or will be there 7/28-31, let us know so we can hook up and
get you the latest scoop on OpenNMS.

Don't forget, we'll also be in Monterey on 7/18-20 and in RTP, NC
on 7/13!

Check the web site for a full listing of the travel schedule!

===========================
The Return of the Wish List
===========================

  "Grab my belly and make a wish." - Kazaam

Boy, have we got stuff for you to do...

If you are a Java developer willing to help implement an event
correlation engine from spec, your day has dawned. Also, if you do
JDBC, we've got some work for you as well.

If either of these fit your bill, let me know...

============================
OpenNMS Job Opportunities?!?
============================

What?!? Get paid to write GPL code?!?

If you are a Java developer and you'd like to join the OpenNMS team,
drop us a line. We've got some interesting things in the works, thanks
to a little action on the funding front and some of our partners
stepping up to help as well.

So if you'd like to talk further (and the mid-Atlantic coast doesn't
bother you...), contact luke@opennms.org.

Shane O.
========
Shane O'Donnell
OpenNMS
shane@opennms.org
===================
It's Revolution, not Evolution
at http://www.opennms.org !!!!

= = = = = = = OpenNMS.org List Message = = = = = = = = =
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message with a body of
"unsubscribe general <email>" to majordomo@opennms.org.