Monday November 20, 2006
Monday November 20, 2006 Installing OpenDS Made Easier
I may be a bit biased, but I've never considered OpenDS all that hard to install or configure. Since the end of July, it's been possible to download and unpack a weekly build or check out and build the code for yourself, and for the last couple of weeks we've made our daily builds available. Today, we're debuting a new installation and setup mechanism that takes it one step further.It's still possible to download our latest weekly build (you can get build 017 here), unzip it and run the setup program. However, if you do that, you'll probably notice that it's a graphical program rather than text-mode (unless you're running without a GUI available, or unless you provide the "--cli" argument). It will display a panel that asks you for the listen port and root DN and password. It will then ask what you want to use as the base DN for the database and how you want to populate it. You can leave the database entry, only add the base entry, import data from an LDIF, or generate any number of sample entries. It will then configure and optionally start the server.
But what's even better is that it's no longer necessary to download and unzip the build. Instead, we have a new installer based on Java Web Start technology that allows you to install the server by clicking a link in your browser. To give it a shot, follow this link. For a detailed description of what you'll see, check out the new QuickSetup guide that gives you a blow-by-blow description of the process with screen shots.
If you're reading the documentation, you might also come across our new Quick Reference Guide that gives you a basic summary of how to do a lot of common tasks in the server, complete with a number of sample usages for the command-line tools. We've also got a Command Line Usage Guide that provides complete usage information for all of the utilities that we provide with the server. It still needs some work, but it's a lot better than the nothing that we had before in this area before.
A big thanks and congratulations should go out to Brian Ehret and Josu Vergara-Lecue for putting the new graphical tools together and for putting up with all my complaining while it was under construction, and for the rest of the team for helping out with suggestions and testing.
Posted by cn_equals_directory_manager ( Nov 20 2006, 11:30:39 PM CST ) Permalink
Monday November 06, 2006 Exploring OpenDS Made Easier
Over the weekend, we made a couple of changes that make exploring the OpenDS codebase even easier, and should hopefully help make it easier to use, understand, and extend the server. While the infrastructure that java.net provides offers a number of features, it doesn't allow us to run our own daemons and perform arbitrary processing (for obvious security reasons). As such, for anything that might require capabilities beyond what java.net provides, we need to handle on our own servers. We were already doing that for content that is available only on Sun's internal network, but we are now using an external system to make some of this content publicly available.The first of these elements is our daily builds mechanism. As you may already know, we already make weekly builds available on java.net, but we have also been performing automated daily builds on an internal server. Now, our daily builds are available externally as well at http://builds.opends.org/daily-builds/, with the latest build always reachable through http://builds.opends.org/daily-builds/latest/. If you want to try the latest build of OpenDS but don't want to check out and compile it yourself then you can get it here. You can also browse the latest Javadoc documentation and see our code coverage reports. The daily builds will be kicked off at around 11:30 pm Central Time and should be complete within about ten minutes, but if you want to be notified whenever the latest build is available you can go to https://opends.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectMailingListList and subscribe to the daily-builds@opends.dev.java.net mailing list.
The second element that we have made publicly available is a source code browser, at http://builds.opends.org/source/. This site uses the OpenGrok source code search engine, which is also used to provide access to the OpenSolaris source code. The code is updated every 30 minutes, and the source code elements are all cross-referenced, so clicking on a variable name in the code will take you to the location at which that variable is declared, and clicking on a class name will allow you to search for all usages of that class throughout the source code. It's much more feature-rich than the bare-bones source browser provided by java.net, although the java.net version does have historical information that we haven't yet gotten working in OpenGrok.
In the future, we may make additional services available on this system, but we're currently using this as a trial to see how it works. Any feedback or suggestions that you might have are welcome.
Posted by cn_equals_directory_manager ( Nov 06 2006, 02:49:23 PM CST ) Permalink
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