Luminis IV.2 development enviornment
Has anyone built a limited "development" luminis IV enviornment on a single desktop machine (including database) to support development of channelsand content (including sdk/cdk development)? We would like to have a few development enviornments for our content and jav programmers and possibly build a vmware image to give to these users so they all have their own development enviornment.
Thanks
Ed Jacobs
Metro State
not quite
We have a spare PC with Linux installed on it. On this we have an installation of Oracle. For each dev environment on a desktop, we create the schemas needed on this one Oracle.
Then, yes, we have Luminis 4 installed on desktop Windows XP machines.
I am sure that it would be quite easy to put the Oracle (or another DB of your choice) onto the same machine.
My choice of VM at the moment is VirtualBox. (Although I was tricked into installing Ubuntu 9.10 for my host machine which is causing me problems.)
There are some caveats and disclaimers as SungardHE do not support Luminis on Windows XP (and at one point the python installer scripts needed hacking to give the file the right permissions...)
I am not sure that they recognise Ubuntu linux either.
Derek
University of Leeds, UK
Personal version
I have a VMWare based instance I use when I am doing development. It is built using the free VMWare Server, CentOS as a substitute for RedHat Linux, and Oracle. I use it do development level testing, as well as for initial upgrade planning. I keep it looking pretty much like our production environment. The biggest limitation is that it is not capable of doing Banner single sign ons.
considerations about personal dev env vs prod
That hits on an important consideration.
Which areas will you be using your personal development environment (or local Luminis install) for, and which can you leave out. For example:
Skinning - having an environment with the vanilla skin can simplify fault resolution, but not many institutions would run with the vanilla skin in production. (Depending on how often you tweak your skin design - and alter nested-tables.xsl)
Person Data - i.e. the IMS import, or the Banner INTCOMP. This limits the userbase that is available for testing, but also restricts the scope / complexity. i.e. this is data in the Luminis LDAP (and some parts of the uPortal schema). A related decision is to develop any external auth and fall through auth (i.e. we authenticate via Active Directory in prod).
Single Sign On - In some cases (like Banner PINs via INTCOMP) this will not be easy or sensible to set up, but I often find it invaluable to experiment with SSO from a machine with more firewall restrictions.
Parallel Deployment - Due to the differences with some configman settings and the links to the Calendar Server etc. there is plenty of scope for needing a dev environment for this.
External Data - i.e. attributes read from JDBC sources using personDirectory.xml, which is one that we have been looking at closely. How do you find out which property setting allows an LP webserver to recover from poor network performance? (turn over now if you do not want to see the answer <property name="validationQuery">select 'Always Returns a Single Row'</property>) (bonus question, which DB flavour is this for?)
Then of course there are the channels and the Portlets, and the sendmail and the differences between OS for dev and prod (hint: case sensitivity does not exist in Windows)
Anyway, just some thoughts for the day.
Derek
University of Leeds, UK