Re: Open Source Applications for IT You've Never Heard Of

Alan Williamson is planning to present about Open Source application that most of people don't know about.

He is also asking the community to contribute their lists. Well, I have three tools that I like enough to mention (again).

Ethereal

Whenever you have to troubleshoot an application with a lot of network traffic, Ethereal is a good tool to keep in mind. It allows to see the network traffic on both high and low level and is flexible enough to narrow down exactly to the information subset needed. And it keeps getting better.

XMLStarlet

If you are trying to extract some information from an XML file, XMLStarlet is a great way to quickly try several approaches without having to type a lot of XSLT. I have written about it before , but there were some bigger introduction articles written about it later here and here

GraphViz

This is a visualization tool that allows you to build complex graphs (directed or otherwise) from a very simple description language. I talked about it in depth before as well.

All of these tools have just enough of a learning curve, to need an effort to learn them. But once you get over that initial hump, the tools are suddenly very applicable nearly at the daily basis. From my experience, I really would recommend to have a look at them, so that later, when the actual needs arises, you would know that the powerful, open source tools exist to help you out.

BlogicBlogger Over and Out