opensource.com

The Java Development Kit (JDK) provides binaries, tools, and compilers for the development of Java applications. One helpful tool included is jconsole.

To demonstrate, I will use the WildFly J2EE application server, which is part of the JBOSS open source application server project. First, I start up a standalone instance.

Computer programming, also known as coding for short, is not about which language you use. It's about developing programming logic and learning to think like a programmer. The language you start with should be the one that helps you the most in this endeavor. So you have to ask yourself the question: "What do you want to do as a programmer?"

If you've ever tried writing YAML, you may have been initially pleased with how apparently easy it looks. At first glance, the YAML that's often used for configuration files, Ansible playbooks, and flat-file databases looks more or less as intuitive as a shopping list. However, there's a lot of nuance in YAML's structure, and it conceals a dangerous secret: YAML is actually a highly precise, structured, and surprisingly strict language. The good news is that you only need to understand two things to know how YAML works.

Automation is the great IT and DevOps ideal, but in my experience, anything that's not immediately convenient may as well not exist at all. There have been many times when I've come up with a pretty good solution for some task, and I'll even script it, but I stop short of making it literally automated because the infrastructure for easy automation doesn't exist on the machine I'm working on.

Ansible is a top open source project which, on the surface, looks to provide a simple way to standardize your existing automation and allow it to run in parallel across multiple hosts, and it does this very successfully. Yet, in reality, Ansible has the capabilities to extend what your existing automation does to incorporate other systems and really simplify tasks across all aspects of your daily routine.

I try to use Ansible often, even for tasks that I know how to do with a shell script because I know that Ansible is easy to scale. Even though I might develop an Ansible playbook just for my personal workstation, sometimes it ends up being a lot more useful than intended, and it's easy to apply that same playbook to all the computers on my network. And besides, sometimes the greatest enemy of getting really good at something is the impression that it's only meant for serious professionals, or big projects, or whatever you feel that you're not.

In December 2021, CentOS 8 will reach end of life and be replaced by CentOS Stream. One of the major changes between previous iterations of CentOS and CentOS Stream is the lack of minor versions. Centos Stream has adopted a continuous release cycle. From the beginning of this year, developers in the Foreman community started to see the benefits of earlier bug detection and patching that CentOS Stream offers as a result of the continuous releases. We no longer have to wait for the next release to take advantage of the latest changes and bugfixes.

It is easy to use your Linux distribution's package management tool to install the Java software packages. However, sometimes you need to do a manual installation of Java. This is of particular importance to administrators of Java-based application servers such as Tomcat or JBoss. Many open source and proprietary software products rely on these services.

The Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is provided in two different forms: The Java Development Kit (JDK) or the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

The current popularity of cryptocurrencies also includes trading in them. Last year, I wrote an article How to automate your cryptocurrency trades with Python which covered the setup of a trading bot based on the graphical programming framework Pythonic, which I developed in my leisure. At that time, you still needed a desktop system based on x86 to run Pythonic. In the meantime, I have reconsidered the concept (web-based GUI).

Port forwarding transfers network traffic from one network listener (called a "port") to another, either on the same computer or a different computer. Ports, in this context, are not physical objects but a software routine listening for network activity.

In the first part of my interview with Sam Knuth, a fellow Open Organization Ambassador, we discussed how leaders need to make time to be open. Openness isn't effortless.

I recently attended the Practical Open Source Information POSI conference, which was held on a free and open source video conferencing platform. As I attended a series of excellent talks about practical uses of open source software, I realized how commonplace video conferencing had become over the past few years.

If open source does anything, it provides choice, and now that more and more workers have the freedom of working remotely, having an option in the way you connect makes a lot of sense.

With tech and data safety awareness rising, open source software is becoming a go-to option for organizations of all classes more than ever. Nonprofit organizations are particularly vulnerable on the financial side while at the same time dealing with vital social and environmental issues.

This article observes the adoption of open source collaboration technologies in nonprofit organizations by using Nextcloud and ONLYOFFICE as examples.

There are a number of different ways to install Java on your Linux desktop. An obvious route is to use the packages provided in your Linux distribution. Note that this doesn’t work for everyone; for example, some users may need a very specific version of Java.

Before you can start, you must determine “which Java” you need. Do you just need to run some .class files or a .jar file? Or are you writing some code that you need to compile?

As an avid amateur musician, I've worked with many different software programs to create both simple and complex pieces. As my projects have grown in scope, I've used composition software ranging from basic engraving to MIDI-compatible notation to playback of multi-instrument works. Composers have their choice of proprietary software, but I wanted to prove that, regardless of the need, there is an open source tool that will more than satisfy them.

Microsoft Exchange has for many years been nearly unavoidable as a platform for groupware environments. Late in 2020, however, an Austrian open source software developer introduced grommunio, a groupware server and client with a look and feel familiar to Exchange and Outlook users.

Mozilla Firefox was one of the applications that opened my eyes to open source. It wasn't by any means the tipping point, but it was part of a larger cumulative effect of several open source applications grabbing my attention, which ultimately resulted in me switching to Linux, and never looking back. Since switching to Firefox, which occurred well before I consciously changed to open source, I've been an avid Firefox user. My mobile phone was a Firefox OS mobile phone, and it was until the project was abandoned.

Static website generators and JAMStack have taken off in recent years. And with good reason. There is no need for complex backends with only static HTML, CSS, and Javascript to serve. Not having backends means better security, lower operational overhead, and cheaper hosting. A win-win-win!

LibreOffice is my productivity application of choice. It's one of the most potent reasons for recommending Linux distributions to educators and students, whether PK-12 or higher education. Now that the school year is upon us, I thought I would recommend some LibreOffice shortcuts and tips that might save you valuable time.

I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Here are the most common shortcuts that apply to all LibreOffice applications.

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows for a layer of abstraction between the operating system and the hardware. Normally, your OS looks for disks (/dev/sda, /dev/sdb, and so on) and partitions within those disks (/dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1, and so on).