Re: [DataVision-users] Datavision Delivery

[Charles W. <ch...@ho...>]

Jonathan Marsden wrote:
> Charles Whittington wrote:
> 
>> Level 1 Java Webstart to include as many drivers as licencing allows
>> Level 2 OS/distro specific installers as and when
>> Level 3 Tarball
>>
>> all files to be managed under source code control not interfering with 
>> basic tarball construction.
>>
>> Is this agreed?
> 
> Sort of.  I'm not sure what the "levels" terminology really means or 
> buys us; are you implying by using it that "Level 1" is in some sense 
> always "better" than a Level 2, etc.?  That seems ... not necessarily 
> agreed, shall we say :-)
> 

I think I was meaning to infer levels of user knowledge to use it and/or 
platform independence (which might happen to be similar things). Not an 
issue really except that it did promote the discussion (rather more than 
I intended)!

> I did write a list of multiple possible packages earlier, which included 
> items from all three of your levels; I think different packages will be 
> more appropriate for different end users with different needs and 
> preferences and expectations.
> 
> BTW, regarding "as and when" ... we already have the first unofficial 
> test Windows-specific installer, the script files to create it are 
> already in Subversion :-)
> 
> Do you currently have anything (Makefile, shell scripts, build.xml 
> fragments, ...) that creates a DataVision JWS/jnlp "package" we could 
> add to the repository?

Well I would like to iron out the things I know about before then. I 
have a (linux) script which makes .jnlp files for hontreasurer.com 
versions so I suppose that a similar thing could be cooked up for 
datavision.

This is the .jnlp file commented by me (I hate xml files and their 
comment convention).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Test for Datavision Deployment -->
<jnlp
spec="1.0+"
<!-- obviously the version should go here in case the version of 
datavision is a prerequisite for releases of other products (e.g. 
hontreasurer.com) -->
codebase="http://www.hontreasurer.com/SACSSystem/DataVision"
href="DataVision.jnlp">
<!--  self reference - irritating -->
<information>
<title>DataVision Report Generator</title>
<!-- To be decided -->
<vendor>Jim Maynard</vendor>
<!-- To be agreed -->
<homepage href="http://www.hontreasurer.com"/>
<!-- should be datavision home page -->
<description>Datavision Report Generator</description>
<description kind="short">Datavision</description>
<!-- both to be agreed -->
</information>
<security>
<all-permissions/>
<!-- required to be able to access the local file system and gives rise 
to all the crap warning messages -->
</security>
<resources>
<jar href="DataVision.jar"/>
<!-- jar compiled by me in Netbeans -->
<j2se href="http://java.sun.com/products/autodl/j2se" version="1.4+"/>
<extension name="mysql-connector.jnlp" 
href="../mysql-connector/mysql-connector.jnlp"/>
<!-- refers to the mysql jdbc driver required for hontreasurer.com -->
<-- any other drivers which can legally be distributed could be added 
here, preferably getting them from their own .jnlp files if they have 
them -->
<extension name="datavision.jnlp" href="../datavision/datavision.jnlp"/>
<!-- refers to the hontreasurer distribution of datavision to get the 
jruby etc files -->
</resources>
<application-desc/>
</jnlp>

Not too sophisticated!! If there is anyone out there who knows more 
about .jnlp files than I do, please suggest improvements.

More of a problem is where to deploy the .jnlp and .jar files for 
datavision, ruby, driver, etc .

Let me get the demo working decently before we address these other issues.

If anyone else can try the demo, perhaps on different platforms, any 
feedback would be welcome.

Yours,

Charles Whittington
www.hontreasurer.com
www.honsecretary.com