Abiquo’s middleware soon available in Windows

We aim to have a platform-independent product so it became necessary to develop a portable version for Windows. Currently, Abiquo’s middleware runs over Cygwin (which is not the best solution :))

One of our principles is avoiding developing and maintaining any environment or project that already exists. We won’t spend our time reinventing the wheel! (in the open source world, we mean). Therefore, we downloaded; studied and evaluated the two nowadays most used portable projects: Apache Portable Runtime Project and Netscape Portable Runtime. Both offer complete, interesting and useful portable options for Linux developers.

However, we finally decided to implement our own portable runtime :). And we did that to maintain our best middleware skill: the small 300k binary file. Even if the two portable options are excellent developments; they would duplicate the extension of the binary file.

Abiquo’s middleware has its critical modules in HashMap, Threads and Sockets. In order to adapt the Threads we needed the pthreads-win32 project as dependence. Winsockets has its own implementation and we only had to adapt the source code for the SocketServer class. So, finally, we made and abstract layer for a Windows Hashmap.

You’ll be able to download and try this Windows version in the new version of the Abiquo platform (coming soon…)

Tags: Abiquo, Apache, Middleware, netscape, windows

AbiCloud: the cloud computing of Abiquo

If a Cloud is not a Grid where does abiquo fit? Abiquo is taken from the Ubiquity definition, and regarding cloud computing the keys are abstraction and availability, so yes we do fit!

We strongly believe an standard is necessary, in this way we agree with the cloud evangelists. That’s where abiCloud is going to try to fill the gap.

First of all, we are focussing in the Cloud Resource Description definition and the Virtual Application Life cycle. OVF and WS-management is our strong bid:

As regarding the administrator interface we chose the GoGrid strategy, make it pretty first and then make it accessible. However, the chosen RIA technology is FLEX.

But that’s just the firsts steps of a big project. The community plays an important role,  so if you are interested send an e-mail to clouding@abiquo.com, ideas, feed-back, suggestions are more than welcomed.

Tags: Abiquo, cloud computing, flex

Our platform is available for download :-)

Just a few lines to announce you that today we have released a beta version of our platform :-)

You can download it from our site: www.abiquo.com

It’s an open source platform for building & managing distributed applications easily. For me, the most distinctive feature is that you can use small devices (routers, smartphones, sensors…) as nodes, due to the small footprint of our middleware.

Now we are finishing different products over it:

• RIA management portal
• abiCloud: [Yes, another competitor in the market] An application to spread services in a cloud, or build them into your company
• abiNtense: A set of tools for boosting the execution of distributed apps (through AI agents) while guaranteeing the security and QoS
• abiData: An implementation of map-reduce for managing terabytes of data in different machines

As a reference, trovit is using our platform for improving their SEO (distributed crawlers, intensive data processing, avoiding html cache…). Another one could be a demo prototype that we made for www.fon.com which is a good approach to the “internet of things”.

Ideas, feed-back, suggestions, even critics, are more than welcome :-)

Tags: Abiquo, platform

Two new costumers for the next quarter

This month we’ll be starting two important projects:

• Trovit , one of the largest vertical search engines will use abiquo platform. Combining the experience of the abiquo team in distributed technologies (Hadoop, Map Reduce, Katta, Bailey, etc) and cloud computing solutions to create a high scalability and high availability system. All monitorized this with a centralized web portal to save management costs.

• On the other hand, abiquo team is launching an ambitious project in Cornellá de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain). The next generation of grid architectures: The Citizen Grid. A software platform that will not only offer Boinc like capabilities but also user interaction, P2P and social network generation.

We are extremely excited with these projects, completely different objectives sharing the very same platform, abiquo platform. We will keep you posted on the advances.

Tags: Abiquo, citilab, citzen, grid, searcher, social networks, trovit