Re: [xmlblaster] A couple of questions

[Marcel Ruff <ruff at swand.lake.de>]

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