This session is an introduction to the NVO Summer school (NVOSS) software provided for the course. Basic instructions for software component installation on Mac, Windows, or Linux OS will be presented and simple tests will be performed. The NVOSS software examples were developed in JAVA for platform independence. We will review of the general organization of the NVOSS software libraries, data files, applications and tools in preparation for the remainder of the course.

For this to work you need to follow the instructions for installing the NVOSS Software listed on the the software page.

As a group we will look at :

• Student 'Language' familiarity
• Platforms
• Setup Issues and Concerns

Time permitting we would like to demontrate a few key NVO Applications such as:

• Datascope
• Mirage
• WESIX
• Others

Tools and Server setups

We would like to provide here some basic information about the purpose of common server/tools that will be used throughout the course. These will be covered later in the course as well, but it will be helpful to gain some familiarity early on and allow time to focus on the exercises which use these tools.

NOTE: While there are more current versions of Tomcat and Axis available, the recommended configurations in the Software installation instructions are critical for correct performance of the exercises. There are dependencies between Tomcat, Axis, and JDK that require careful attention due to changes in class structure or added/deprecated features.

• Ant

  Ant is an very useful platform independent build system for java and is used thoughout the NVOSS exercises for configuration and testing. Its not exactly make nor is it exactly a scripting language but it covers a little of both. Everything in ant is a task and tasks may depend on other tasks. All tasks are defined in xml files. The default name for the file is build.xml. When you type ant it looks for a file called build.xml to execute tasks. The xml file is structured as a project which contains properties and targets. The targets generally contain the tasks. Any target may be specified on the the command line after ant is invoked so to get the cone classes compiled we could do

  > ant compile 
  

  NOTE: If we do not specify a target for ant then the default target is used. This is specified in the project declaration

     <project name="cone build file" default="dist" base dir=".">

• Tomcat

Apache Tomcat is the servlet container that is we use to serve jsp and Axis deployed services. It is referred to as a 'container' because it is the software repository where we copy and store ('deploy') our local services to. Since we run Tomcat as a local server in these exercises, a few key utilities were created in the NVOSS setup file and are required when deploying a new service. You can test these by running one at a time the following commands:

 StartTomcat 

 StopTomcat 

 BounceTomcat 

• Axis

We are using Apache Axis to implement SOAP ("Simple Object Access Protocol") for the development of Java Web Services.

Axis also provides several Java libraries for serializing and deserializing objects. It is the tool which allows us to convert web services created in other languages into a set of java classes. You will see several instances of this used throughout the course. As defined in the W3C specification:

SOAP is a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It is an XML based protocol that consists of three parts: an envelope that defines a framework for describing what is in a message and how to process it, a set of encoding rules for expressing instances of application-defined datatypes, and a convention for representing remote procedure calls and responses.