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

Middleware in a box

Imagine you can have a tinny virtual machine with an abiquo middleware exposing its resources to everyone:

• 

  Reduce vulnerability in grid nodes against out of control processes (they can destroy the virtual machine information). Safer for the user.

• Homogeneous execution environment for all nodes.
• Add cloud computing benefits to grid computing benefits.

Imagine you can have a light virtual machine (downloadable from the Internet). Easy to install, multiplatform and featuring all abiquo functionalities.

Last Friday, abiquoLabs accomplished this goal. The first prototype of abiquo Platform over a customized virtualized Linux within a VirtualBox and… this box… in Norway :).

Why we choose VirtualBox? Basically because we believe VirtualBox is the better end user virtualization solution, easier for final users.

After this.. we are starting to think about different cool solutions and user applications… they will be here soon ;)

Tags: Abiquo, Middleware, VirtualBox