Announcing Jython Virtual Appliance (Lite)

I am very happy to announce the 1.0 of the Jython Virtual Appliance based on Ubuntu. It's made available by our community member Timo Sugliani. Great job Timo!

To run the virtual appliance, you will need either VMware Workstation, VMware Server or VMware Player. The later two are free products from VMware Download Site.

After compressed to RAR format, the virtual appliance is about 600M. After downloading the virtual appliance here, you can uncompress it to a folder using free 7-Zip or other tools. Double chicking the .vmx file will bring up the Virtual Applicance. The initial username/password is vijava/vijava. You can and should change your credential after first login.

In the home directory in the virtual appliance, there is an existing jython sample code. You can open it with any editor. My recommendation is vim which can highlight the syntax with different colors.

The sample code is really simple, it iterates through the hosts and virtual machines, and print out related information. It doesn't run as it is because it doesn't know your target server (ESX/VC/VMware Server 2.0+) host name or IP address, and username/password. All you need to do is to replace the XXX strings in one line of the sample code to match your environment. When you are done, just run it:

$jython testjython.py

This release is really to test water. It doesn't come with any GUI so that it can be as small as possible. We would love to hear from you what other components you would like to see in the appliance. We plan to build a professional edition which includes more handy tools. Please let us know your feedbacks, thoughts, and suggestions. You can leave your message at the VI Java API forum. You are also welcome to contribute samples that we can include in future releases.

Steve Jin