Forum OpenACS Development: Re: A graphical installer for OpenACS & dotLRN
[quote]I am very impressed. Thank you very much for this important contribution. You could commit this to CVS as soon as you have a more or less stable version. The value of this installer is inestimable since the installation process is often a big obstacle for newbies.[/quote]
Thank you for your kind comments Nima, I am very glad that my work is being appreciated. According to my tests the windows config is currently stable, but this in deployment in operating systems that have been installed by myself and thus all of them have pretty much the same configuration. I cannot decide whether this installation is stable until I actually receive some feedback from others that have successfully installed OpenACS or dotLRN using this method.
[quote]Maybe others are interested to add support for different important linux distributions.[/quote]
That would be great since I can only develop a limited number of configuration scripts due to a very limited timeframe provided by the University of Reading, as this project is part of my MSc dissertation and is due by mid September.
[quote]Maybe in the long run it is possible to add support for different important modules as listed here:
http://empoweringminds.mle.ie/openacs/aolserver_modules
This brings me to the idea to make the installer focus on aolserver and add support for toolkits like those listed here:
http://panoptic.com/wiki/aolserver/255 [/quote]
you are right, this would be the best approach, although I am not sure how well all these modules would work in Jamie's binary build of the AOLwebserver for windows (which is quite old actually - version4 beta10)
[quote]Some other thoughts I had:
- Will you add oracle support?
- I saw that you are using JBuilder. Maybe it is possible to port to Eclipse since it is open source and has alot of support.[/quote]
The idea behind this whole project was to provide an one-step solution for the inexperienced user (since the experienced ones would probably want -and have the knowhow-to use the sources to compile and optimize for their installation). In order to do that, some "options" and certain "flexibility" must be sacrifised. I have come up with a solution that would install cygwin, postgres, aolserver, init the postgres oacs database, create postgres users, and wrap it up all together without the user's interaction during the process. I am not sure if this would be possible with oracle (I mean I cannot just zip the directory and pass it through like I do with cygwin + postgres).
I agree, my implementation (http://www.ncs.gr/openacs/1.0.0/config/windows.cfg) is very very cruel but it meets the purpose.
As far as JBuilder vs Eclipse is concerned, I only used it for the early stages of the GUI design (Gridbag layout java mess), most of the time I was just using a text editor, and now that I have a structure for all I rarely use it.
Answers to Al Essa:
[quote]Vlassis, great work. We will try out. If we provide you access remotely to a MacOS server, would you be able to work on MacOS version?[/quote]
Hi Al, thanks a lot. Please let me know as soon as you have some results from the installation. I am very interested on some feedback.
I am not sure if I can make it happen with the MacOS server before the end of my project (mid september), because a 25.000 words document for the university is breathing down my neck, but quite possibly I will continue working on this project after the completion of my MSc, since I became quite interested in the world of OpenACS.
Thanks both of you for your comments. I am looking forward for some more feedback and possibly some results of installation tests.
