A colleague of mine who's been learning the "cloud" says that Amazon EC2 may offer the simplest way to test ManifoldCF with proprietary connectors. Specifically we'd want to start testing with SharePoint 2010. The steps are as follows:
(1) Set up an instance. Amazon probably already offers a SharePoint installed instance. For other instances, we'd need to transfer the iso data into the Amazon file system, which may be time consuming but only need be done once. (2) Run the instance when needed. Amazon provides an API for this which means we can even write tests that turn the instance on or off during the test. This is probably also a good way to manage concurrency, since if the instance is already up the test can wait until it comes back down, etc. (3) Fees are 10-20 cents/hour, which is quite manageable, but somebody will need to cough up a credit card that can be billed for this (probably me). I'm going to start by testing our current SharePoint connector in branches/CONNECTORS-221 by hand to be sure that the jar changes needed by the CMIS connector did not have any unfortunate effects on Axis, and I'll post if this seems like a viable plan. Thoughts? Karl
