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Re: [xmlblaster] A couple of questions



matthew.jones at sophos.com wrote:

Hi,

I've been sort of evaluating xmlblaster for our needs and have one or two
questions regarding that. We need to communicate between a manage and
managed computers in an asynchronous fashion and MOM is one possible
solution (xmlblaster is certainly cost effective and seems to be the only
viable open source solution). What we really want to do, is send messages
in a point to point scheme and our primary development language is C++. I
have some Java experience although I don't claim to be an expert and the
'J' word does strike fear into some people here so any evaluation I have
done has been in Java using the supplied test programs.

Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but xmlblaster seems to be a product
still very much in development and my conclusion is that to get the best
out of it we'd really have to actively join in. Unfortunately, I don't
think that's likely to happen unless, of course, it did fulfil many of our
requirements. In order to carry the xmlblaster banner, so to speak, I'd
need to be able to list a number of reference sites, i.e. people actually
using it in a "live" environment, are there any at the moment?

The other things we'd really like to see are as follows:
1. How easy it is to secure the messaging service using certificates, i.e.
how much effort would be required on our part?

I don't know what your view on 'certificates' is, but authentication and authorization has
a powerful plugin abstraction, i believe you can do almost anything you want there.
The current plugins available don't go very far but they support LDAP access and a simple
passwd based schema.
You certainly need to do your own coding (e.g. add a new plugin).
Using a secure channel (like SSL) is possible with almost all supported protocols
(XML-RPC, CORBA, RMI).
Please read:
http://www.xmlblaster.org/xmlBlaster/doc/requirements/security.introduction.html


2. How stable is any "current release". The memory footprint of the server
I downloaded three weeks ago certainly grew over time. This is probably in
part due to xmlblaster still being actively developed.

The release 0.80 is broken for 'volatile' messages.
All the rest is considered stable, and i don't believe we have a memory leak there.


The currently development is *very* active, we hope to settle until end of year
so code can mature.


3. What platforms is it currently running on? We're interested in platforms
outside the Windows / Unix arena including MAC and Netware.


The server runs everywhere where a JDK 1.2 or better is available.
The C++ client code is currently under heavy development and is
currently tested under Windows, Linux and Solaris.

4. Is there any "this is how you use" type of documentation? The Java API
documentation is a start but that's not really at an introductory level
(and not much use if all we use is C++ anyway).

No sorry, no user guide is available.
The 'reference handbook' goes into deep detail for many topics.


Currently, we're more inclined to use CORBA directly, possibly with the
notification service, but I thought I'd ask a few questions here in case I
have not found out all the information regarding xmlblaster. Xmlblaster
sounds like a great "product" to me but I also realise that we'd need to be
happy with various aspects of it before we committed to using it.


Yep, we can't help you here,

good luck

Marcel