Hi Michael, > I start porting the commands to the new OpenCA API. Before I port the > functions for the initialization of a CA to the new API does it make > sense to put the init stuff into the web interface? Does it be perhaps > better to initialize the CA via the commandline (only with OpenCA and a > running database)? > > Perhaps it is a good idea to setup a really simple commandline client > before starting the porting effort. If we have a commandline client then > we can remove the batch stuff from the web interfaces. The most people > who have to deal with batch stuff want exactly this.
in my opionion it would be best to start with a command line client. Initialization is (IMO) a task that can easily be performed on the command line, a web frontend is not really necessary for this. Same for batch processor, backup and recovery. In addition, if you start by implementing the CLI interface, you will get a running system very quickly. The complete web frontend will take a lot of work to port, I think. So how about porting only the strictly CA/RA/Pub related functions and have other stuff handled via CLI. Maybe this is also the time to think about a new way to implement the web interface. The way it is implemented currently has some drawbacks: code and HTML generation is not separated, and the HTML is not very readable when output via print statements. In addition the CGI interface is not very fast because each request requires re-reading the etc/servers config files. I think there are two major issues that can be improved: - in addition to CGI interface also add a method for direct invocation by Apache, i. e. via mod_perl - introduce a template oriented web frontend implementation. My favourite implemtenation is HTML::Mason, maybe Template will also work. I've already done a (simple) frontend using HTML::Mason before and found it extremely powerful and easy to work with. Maybe a good idea for OpenCA as well. I'd volunteer for a sample implementation of an alternative web frontend, but I am not sure how much time I can spend for this currently. Will take some time before something useful emerges. What do you think, should I try to do this? (Perhaps some kind soul can help me with SCEP, then I might have more time for the frontend... :-) I still can't get it working on my system. Tested three different OpenCA installations and all three SCEP CLI clients I found, no luck yet...) Martin ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: IntelliVIEW -- Interactive Reporting Tool for open source databases. Create drag-&-drop reports. Save time by over 75%! Publish reports on the web. Export to DOC, XLS, RTF, etc. Download a FREE copy at http://www.intelliview.com/go/osdn_nl _______________________________________________ OpenCA-Devel mailing list OpenCA-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openca-devel
