[kepler-dev] Re: [SDM-SPA] downloadable actors

[Vouk]

Xiaowen Xin wrote:

>Hi Everyone,
>
>Something that we'd like to implement as part of SPA/Kepler is an Actor
>Repository with some actors that we don't include as part of the normal
>distribution.  So people can go there, and download additional actors.
>
>What do you all think is a good mechanism for doing this?
>
I think we need to distinguish 3 types of actors
- generic actors (such as webservices) which are likely to be in the 
distribution
- domain specific actors (which may be in the disttribution only if we 
agree that they form part of
    the domain library, e.g., biolib or astrolib, however we may have 
domain specific actors which
    are production, but not part of the general distribution, e.g., mattlib
- experimental actors (that can be anything).

tar ball with instructions may be sufficient for experimental and 
non-lib actors.

>
>More specifically, we could simply distribute a tarball that includes
>the actor source code, class file, and xml configuration file, ask the
>user to unpackage it in a certain directory that's in her classpath. 
>Then, ask the user to import that configuration file.  After doing this,
>the actor will get inserted into "~/.ptolemyII/user library.xml", so the
>next time the user runs SPA/Kepler, the system will automatically load
>the actor.
>
>However, this method seems to be quite complicated from a user
>perspective.  It would be ideal to simply have the users download one
>file, put it in a certain directory, and the system automatically loads
>it at startup.
>
>Dave and I have been thinking that we could potentially distribute these
>actors as .jar files, that have the source, class file, and
>configuration file all within.  The user could put this jar file in
>~/.ptolemyII/ and the system should automatically load it at startup.
>
That will work too (potential issue: since this may  not be part of the 
normal download associated maintenance
 on install of distributions, it may lead to broken installs - on user part)

>
>On the downside, the implementation of this might be somewhat involved. 
>We would need to execute something that finds all jar files in
>~/.ptolemyII/ and create our own classloader that has the jar files in
>its classpath.  Then we would need to somehow add the newly found actors
>to the treeview at the lefthand side.
>
>Do you all know of any built-in mechanisms that can help do this?
>
I would keep it very simple.

Mladen

>
>Thanks,
>Xiaowen
>
>  
>