froscon06 1.02
FrOSCon 2006
Free and Open Source Software Conference
| Speakers | |
|---|---|
|
Cornelius Schumacher |
| Schedule | |
|---|---|
| Day | 2 |
| Location | HS3 |
| Start time | 12:00 |
| Duration | 01:00 |
| INFO | |
| ID | 52 |
| Type | Lecture |
| Track | Applications |
| Language | english |
The SUSE Linux Feature Tracking Tool
For creation of all its SUSE Linux products Novell has developed an open source feature tracking tool which is based on XML technology and open standards. It consists of a data server and a set of specific clients for managing information about the features which are to be included in the SUSE Linux products during the distribution development process. This presentation will give a technical insight into the architecture and design of the tool and demonstrate how it can be used to solve the problem of feature tracking.
For creation of all its SUSE Linux products Novell has developed an open source feature tracking tool which is heavily based on XML technology and open standards. It consists of a data server, two special-purpose web clients and a full-featured native rich client.
The server provides the feature data as XML via standard HTTP. Data is stored in a native XML database and queried by XQuery requests. The server also centrally provides resources like transformation style sheets for rendering data, XML schemas and auxiliary data shared by the different clients. It is designed to support clients with offline mode and provides history and change notification for feature data.
The rich client, which is based on the KDE framework, offers full browsing, querying and editing capabilities. In addition there are two web clients, one client implemented in Perl for access of a subset of the data through partners and a client for internal use which provides a rich set of querying and browsing options through its Java Server Faces based implementation. All clients share essential parts of their implementation through XSLTs and other resources centrally provided by the server.
In our presentation we will present for the first time how we successfully employed XML technology and open standards to create an open source solution for feature tracking which significantly helped to improve the development process of SUSE Linux products.