A killer app for OGSA-DAI

I unfortunately spent most of the day today trying to get a simple client to pull a simple query from a newly created MySQL database. I keep checking the logs, seeing that the connection was refused, and I haven't figured out why... What makes it more puzzling is that I can connect to MySQL using the MySQL administrator and the generic MySQL client.

Perhaps I am using the wrong JDBC connector... as the version of MySQL on this machine (4.1.22 installed by VDT for RFT) is older than the more common version 5. Perhaps I am using the wrong version of the JDBC connector or am invoking it improperly. I have checked the resource files and the logons.txt files and haven't found anything out of spec there... I will probably just avoid using it tomorrow and instead focus on enhancing the JSP I've built rather than continue hammering on trying to get it to connect to this new resource.

Either way... a significant portion of my time has been hunting down configuration mishaps. Needless to say Ant build scripts run from command line with lots of variables are very dodgy... and it is very easy to make mistakes which have to be hunted down later. I really think a killer app for OGSA-DAI is going to be a easy-configuration engine with a connection checker... just so that it becomes much easier to make sure the ducks are all in a row for pulling data from a given view in a given database at a given medical center... otherwise we'll probably be sending Centers of Excellence 15-page debugging guides and dedicated a 20-head help-center to correcting the bugs I keep running into.