I have finally decided to learn all this stuff about Test Driven Design (TDD). I have a few projects that I go back to every now and then and it would be nice to be able to start hacking away without needing to remember every bit of the project. After looking around and investigating several other Continuous Integration systems I have ended up on Jenkins with ShiningPanda plugin. The development team where I work uses Jenkins and it is reasonably easy to set up but I was initially against it because the machine I have to run it on is fairly low spec. It turns out it isn’t too much of a resource hog for a JVM based application (only 20% of my memory and 10% constant CPU usage).

The web servers I use at work are multi homed with the default route being the internal management network. We came across an issue where we wanted to make a XMLHTTPRequest for a data feed from another company into our web app. We all know due to cross-site scripting attacks this is no longer possible so we had to write a little proxy script to pull the data and serve it from our own site. The standard python httplib doesn’t have the ability to bind to a specific interface so I have done a little sub-classing and now have a HTTPConnection which allows me to bind to a specific interface. Hope this helps someone as from my searching it seems to be a common request. You will need to change the IP address to match your setup :-)

I have used a few web frameworks over the years but I think I have finally found the one that suits my particular needs. I have played with RoR, Turbo Gears, Catalyst and a couple of others but none have actually made me want to write code instead of hoping that it allows me to write less. That was until I discovered Django. A friend of mine had said he was using it for his website but for some reason I managed to get it stuck in my head that he was using Mambo CMS so I never really paid it much attention.

Libvirt is fast becoming the standard tool for managing virtual machines on Linux and Qpid is the Apache Foundation’s new implementation of AMQP which is the first open standard for Enterprise Messaging. These two technologies have the potential to work well together for large virtualization installations and luckily for us the good guys in the libvirt team have done just that http://libvirt.org/qpid/ but there are currently very few examples on how to use it. I am putting this brief tutorial in their wiki as a starting point for others but will continue to publish my experiences here.