The largest happening lately in PINES-Evergreen land is a little place called e^deltacom. We issued an RFP for server hosting (aka “colocation”) services a while back, and e^deltacom was recently awarded the contract. Our intent in obtaining the services of such a place is to ensure that the PINES system has the best possible chance of staying operational, stable, and physically secure at all times. To say the hosting facility is impressive is an understatement. The following is some information I pulled off their website and some materials we were provided in the RFP process:
Extra Extra! Read all about it!
Hi everyone,
A lot has been happening with the PINES crew and Evergreen development, and we apologize for lagging behind with our blog entries. I want to thank the OPEN-ILS-DEV folks for inquiring about us!
Some highlights:
- We mentioned before that one of us was getting married, though I don’t know if we ever mentioned Bill by name. So congratulations to Bill and Felicia!
- Then, another one of us got married. Congrats to me and Angela! 😉
- And very recently, one of us became a proud father. 😀 Congrats to Mike and Sara!
Now fear not, for despite our wives’ best efforts, we’ve continued to work on Evergreen. 😉
Reporting is the next major component/milestone on our schedule, which Mike and Bill have been architecting. We’ve been getting a lot of input on reporting from the PINES libraries, and we also have the lessons learned from PINES’ last reporting project. The focus is on developing a good infrastructure for templating, creating canned reports, and making data and statistics not just accessible, but presentable as well.
OpenSRF Jabber: A Technical Review
As has been mentioned before on this blog, OpenSRF relies on Jabber for it’s communication layer. Jabber is an instant messaging service much like AIM, Yahoo messenger, and the like. The advantage of Jabber, of course, is that it’s an open spec (see xmpp.org) and there are a number of open source server implementations, allowing us to run servers localy and write our own server code if we feel so inclined.
Like most chat frameworks, a Jabber client is distinguished by its username on the network. So a unique Jabber “account” would consist of something like bill@gapines.org. Jabber also adds an additional component which is called the “resource”. This allows a single account to have multiple open connections to a jabber server. A full client login would be something like bill@gapines.org/home, bill@gapines.org/work, etc. A single user may be logged into a given server as many times as they want so long as the resources are unique for each connection.