From the Dragonfly project to AIT

[marcastel]

Since its inception this initiative had been called the Dragonfly Project. It is only recently that it has been renamed AIT. In this thread I will collect bits and pieces about the history of this project.

[marcastel]

Brief history

The Dragonfly project started in the mid-1980s as a collection of utility scripts for various UNIX flavours, System V, Xenix,
Berkeley BSD, SCO Unix, and later on AIX and Slackware Linux (further Linux distributions were supported in the 1990s). The Dragonfly distribution operated on a wide variety of platforms, ranging from common platforms such as Intel 386, IBM, HP and Sun platforms, to now forgotten platforms such as Atos, ATT, Honeywell-Bull, or Perkin Elmer.

In the early 2000s I took over the maintenance of a cross-platform security monitoring and application integration framework launched in 1997 and used by one of the world's major financial institutions. In the middle of a major outsourcing deal, the framework was progressively deprecated in favour of the outsourcer's home-grown tools.

The framework surpassed commercial products by far in functionality, in modularity and in extensibility. Despite that, neither the financial institution nor the outsourcer were interested in maintaining it. The framework was cross-platform, operating on various UNIX flavours (AIX, Linux, Sun). I ported it to Mac OS/X, and also ported large chunks to MS Windows. I also integrated components from the financial institution's German entity which also operated on IBM mainframes. In 2008 I decided to merge the factory with my Dragonfly project repository.

I had always intended to make the Dragonfly project open source. Various initiatives since 1986 -- on SourceForge and later on GitHub, failed; primarily because of lack of time. The extended collection of source code contained many proprietary contributions and it had to be cleaned up first. Unfortunately, because of this, I could not delegate this work. Additionally the build process was quite complex -- relying directly^(a)^ on 246 Open Source software packages, both standalone utilities and libraries.

^(a)^ If I recall correctly, the total count of Open Source packages, when including all build or runtime dependencies was 2048!

Today, the Open Source parts of the Dragonfly source code still only represent less than 10% of the overall repository.

[marcastel]

Module classification

For memory we keep track of the below classification used to categorise prior Dragonfly modules. This classification is only used for attic modules and is irrelevant in the new open source framework.

Name	Label
aif	Application integration framework (aka Dragonfly/Kernel)
- aif/ccl	Core components and libraries
- aif/cfg	Configuration management
- aif/cui	Console user interface
- aif/auc	Autonomic computing: security, authentication, monitoring, inventory, configuration management
- aif/uuu	Universal Unix utilities
- aif/wui	Web user interface
api	Application programming interface (aka Dragonfly/Toolkit)
- api/bnk	Core banking integration
- api/cpp	C/C++ bindings
- api/ctm	Control M integration
- api/esb	Enterprise service bus integration
- api/ksh	Korn shell framework
- api/kyc	Know your client integration
- api/mqm	IBM MQ Series integration
- api/ode	Odyssey integration
- api/ora	Oracle database integration
- api/php	PHP framework
- api/plx	Perl framework
- api/sap	SAP integration
- api/web	WebSphere and WebLogic integration
fde	Framework development environment (aka Dragonfly/Sandbox)
- fde/doc	Documentation system
- fde/ppd	Pristine packaging and deployment
- fde/sak	Swiss army knife (developer’s toolkit)
- fde/scm	Source code management system
- fde/tas	Test anything suite
ibm	IBM/Tivoli integration kit (aka Dragonfly/Tivoli)
- ibm/trm	TRM integration kit
- ibm/tme	TME integration kit
- ibm/tsm	TSM integration kit
- ibm/tsc	TSCM integration kit