Version 0.5 (4. May 2000), Tomi Engel

With the release of WebObjects 4.5 we faced the question of migrating the deployment system of some of our clients to the new world of monitoring application. This mechanism changed completely and made it necessary to bridge between the two world while the transition was in progress. We have published an article which outlines the situation in more detail.

The farmersWO4taskd brings some of the features from the new wotaskd to the old WebObjects 4.0 servers. It thereby simplifies the integration of a mixed server cluster.

In the current release it only handles the conversion of the WebObjects.conf file to the new XML format and its dynamic distribution.

Package Download

BEWARE: This tool has not yet been heavily tested in deployment setups. No warranty for nothing!

The application is available for download in the following packages:

Note: Please make sure that you also have the required frameworks installed on your system!

Since our server might not be the fastest, we encourage you to search for the files in some of the well known archives if necessary. We recommend: www.peanuts.org (Germany), ftp.beng.org (Germany) and next-ftp.peak.edu (USA). In addition to that we would like to point you to the stepwise softrak service which can direct you to other interesting applications.

Configuration

We currently can not provide a very detailed documentation so we encourage you to read Apples deployment documentation so that you understand how 4.5 and 4.5 handle their configuration. We also encourage you to take a look at the farmersWO4taskds sources.

Most configuration is done via user defaults. In addition the the regular ways they can also be coded into the farmersWO4taskd.defaults file inside the woa-wrapper. Currently they give you control over: config file location, hostname mappings and adaptor / instance parameters according to the new 4.5 XML features (like buffer size and failure redirection URL)

A more detailed description will be provided in the future.

Future development

There are a number of things which could be added to make it even fully compatible with WebObjects 4.5. The farmersWO4taskd could be extended to fully replace the 4.0 Monitor application and take over all the communication that Monitor provides. But since the Monitoring protocol is not documented it would take a lot of reverse engineering to become fully compatible and that effort is hard to justify ... so we do not know what will be implemented in the near future.