GIPSEPoison service move, and GIPSE Service Installers

The GIPSEPoison Service has now moved over to the google code repository (you can check out a read-only copy from http://phgrid.googlecode.com/svn/GIPSEPoisonService/trunk).

But, one of the things that I have been doing has been making an ant-fueled bundle that will install both the GIPSEPoisonService and the GIPSEService with a single ant command. You can read about that here: http://sites.google.com/site/phgrid/Home/service-registry/gipseserviceinstaller.

It essentially uses a properties file to download code from a repository, deploys other service-specific properties files to the downloaded code, and then calls the downloaded code's build and deploy scripts.

The idea is that for future service deploys, I can just email Dan a zip with the appropriate properties files and say "unzip this as [user] and then run 'ant all'". My next hope is to try and see if I can make a mvn based download script so that I can make similar installers for things like GIPSEService. The other cool thing is that both ant and mvn should be easily callable by the NSIS installer that Dan found.

GIPSEPoison supporting zipcodes, now onto easier installers

So, after a lot of planning, I finally managed to get general zip5 and zip3 support working in the GIPSEPoison service. I got it so that the service would only ever have to make two calls to the NPDS-poison service (one for states, one for zips) and that it could return zip3 and zip5 and state results simultaneously, and checked in the code after testing it.

The next thing I am planning to work on is some ant scripting for building and deploying the service in one simple command. The hope is that it will turn the install process for this service into a simple command thus turning about ten steps into about a two step process (one if you are repeating the process or just installing a patch).

Otherwise, it seems the farther future involves the generation of more services, more intricate installers, portals and other service/viewer aggregators. My hope is to just start creating things that make fetching and installing these items as easy as possible.

Cheers

cagrid installer forum

The cagrid team has a thread on their knowledge center on potential scenarios for their installer. This may be of interest to PHGrid as it presents the potential for us to save a lot of the effort we currently spend on building VMs and supporting installs. We've been asked by cagrid to take a look at the scenarios and help them with use cases.