Re: [Exist-development] Questions on packaging for new administration applications

[Wolfgang M. <wol...@ex...>]

Hi Dan,

> We have some questions for the team package the new administration tools we
> are prototyping and some other new tools like an index adviser we are
> working on.

Cool. It would indeed help if those tools could make it into SVN
somewhere to avoid a duplication of efforts. There seems to be some
overlap with work other people are doing (someone's creating a
collection browser with svn integration; I started working on an
"index adviser" - not sure if we had the same idea - as well).

> 1) Do you think that some or all of these tools should be optional in an
> installation?  Do we want to think of them as part of the core eXist system
> or are we now entering the more complex world of "applications"?

It depends on what tools we are talking about. Everything which is now
covered by the admin clients (plus backup/restore and index
configuration/adviser) should probably be considered "core" and should
not be optional, i.e. they should be part of the standard eXist
distribution. However, we could still manage them as self-contained
packages once a packaging mechanism is in place.

I guess we need to proceed step by step. You, me, Loren and others
were thinking about auto-deployment and packaging mechanisms for
XQuery apps for some time. Ideally it should be possible to deploy an
app by just dropping an archive into a directory or uploading it to an
URL. We don't have such a mechanism yet, but if we can work out the
few missing details, e.g. during our meeting in Prague, it should not
be a big issue to implement it.

For a short time plan, it would probably be sufficient to distribute
the administrative tools within a distinct section of the webapp
directory (webapp/administration, which would then replace
webapp/admin). This would allow us to properly test and improve the
tools until they are ready to be repackaged in another way. It would
also be easier to see how all the tools play together and what needs
to be added.

> 2) If these new tools will be considered "Applications" how should they be
> added or removed from eXist site?  How should we track shared resources that
> they depend on?

I think this has to be handled by the packaging mechanism. For
example, certain resources could be marked as shared in the descriptor
for the app, and the package management system would take care to
install them into a shared area.

> 2) Should we create some configuration file entry to have "admin
> applications" be conditionally loaded or not load into a system?  Should we
> have an XForms application to manage this configuration file?

It should at least be possible to disable the entire admin application
suite (for security reasons). Disabling single applications may make
sense if they pose a potential security issue. I don't think disk
space is an issue for the admin apps, so most people will probably
want to have as many enabled as possible.

> 3) Some of the tools will use XSLTForms, the Blueprint CSS frame and JQuery
> JavaScript libraries.  Is there a central place that these should be
> installed?

Right now I try to keep those tools in webapp/scripts (I just added
jquery) or webapp/styles. I use XQueryURLRewrite to redirect the
browser request to the scripts from within subdirectories. This way we
can keep the links simple.

Wolfgang