Connect to WebDAV, FTP, Amazon S3, FTPS, or SFTP servers through a virtual drive which is a full file-system drive which works in DOS, PowerShell, etc.
A nice commecrial XML editor that not only has excellent validation, xslt and xpath and xquery, andformatting objects (fo) features, but supports an XML data grid view and XML Diff & Merge! It even supports generating SVG graphics via XSL transforms on data files, remote editing over FTP or WebDav, and is available as an Eclipse plugin. Only $48 for Academic use.
. Let's assume that this application does storage and retrieval of large media files; the required infrastructure is:
A firewall appliance for connecting to the Internet
A private network connecting the firewall to other systems
A Linux web server running a LAMP stack
A Solaris database machine running MySQL for application persistence
A WebDAV server for the media files
Soon you will be able to write scripts to install "Virtual Data Centers" There seems to be a temptation here to make a virtual data center as complex as a real one - perhaps that is necessary, but this technology is in its early stages. Right now, I wonder if a virtual firewall appliance is as secure or fast as a real one.
Certain kinds of deployment are much more efficiently achieved with virtual servers. This article is a simple and almost hands-on introduction to the way a Sun Cloud deployment can be scripted or have another automated front end for deployment.