SUNIWE
 
 
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Development Tools

The hardware and software required to support the development effort was set up as follows:

Each developer PC ran all of the software components on a single machine for testing. All web applications ran within the same instance of Tomcat and the Web services queried against a MySQL database.

  1. Tomcat

    1. uPortal

    2. Axis

    3. Shibboleth IdP web application

    4. Shibboleth SP web application

  2. MySQL

  3. Shibboleth IdP

  4. Shibboleth SP

A development server ran the same components to allow PCs and the server to test Shibboleth and Web service interactions across the network.

The development team used the MyEclipse IDE, a cheap, subscription-based version of Eclipse, pre-configured with lots of plug-ins for Java, database and Web development.

The development team maintained the source code in a CVS repository on the development server. Eclipse includes a lot of functionality for team working with a CVS code repository.

MyEclipse includes a database perspective to enable viewing and interacting with databases. As well as this functionality, the developers used DbVisualizer, a free version of which is available, which performs the same job. It allows dynamic querying of the database and shows database structure and properties, all very useful when checking the operation of the Web services.

Apache Ant was used to build and deploy the source code. The uPortal source code came with an ant script which was modified to include the SUNIWE source in the build where necessary. An ant script was written for the Web services source code to speed up build and deployment of the Web services code to run under Axis.

Tcpmon, a tool that comes as part of Apache Axis, was used to monitor TCP traffic between the portal channels and Web services. This allowed inspection of the SOAP requests and responses to ensure the information was correct.