Conclusion and Resources

This concludes this introductory (and whirlwind) tour of the Puffin Automation Framework. The third article in this series will focus on setup and configuration to get you up and running your own plans for Puffin. Subsequent articles will cover features in more detail, as well as how to use Puffin for specific tasks like system monitoring and Web application testing.

Resources

• Visit the Puffin home page.
  
  
• Download and install the appropriate Python distribution for your platform.
  
  
• Take a look at the PyXML project, which includes support for many XML, XSL, and XPath functions not yet found in the Python distribution.
  
  
• Webware is an excellent Python-based application server.
  
  
• Puffin's logging system uses the popular log4j design by Vinay Sajip.
  
  
• For the programmer new to Python and regular expressions,"Charming Python: Text processing in Python" summarizes Python's text processing facilities. The article explains some general concepts of regular expressions and offers advice on when to use (or not use) regular expressions while processing text (developerWorks, September 2000).
  
  
• More practical advice on using regular expressions to search for and modify patterns in text is in the tutorial "Using regular expressions". The tutorial starts with the basics, and then progresses to intermediate and advanced topics, with lots of examples along the way (developerWorks, September 2000).
  
  
• Find more Linux articles in the developerWorks Linux zone; and more Web services articles in the developerWorks Web services zone.