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OSCARS Dependencies

An effort was made to keep OSCARS's dependencies on other applications to a minimum. The following are notes on the packages we use:

Hibernate and MySQL

All persistence of reservation and other data is handled using Hibernate. Hibernate is a powerful object-relational mapping system for Java, but has a substantial learning curve. Details on how we use Hibernate and MySQL.

Apache Tomcat

The server portion of OSCARS currently depends on being deployed under Tomcat 5.5 for the browser-based interface. Details of our Tomcat configuration.

Apache Axis2 and Rampart

The API-based interface depends on being deployed under Axis2.1.3. with rampart 1.3 running under Tomcat 5.5. See Axis2.1 installation notes for details how to build, install and configure Axis2.1.3 with Rampart1.3.

Axis 2.1 is the standard Java SOAP implementation. We use SOAP 1.2 messages for communication, rather than 1.1, because of an incompatibility between Axis2-Rampart1.1 and SOAP fault handling for SOAP 1.1. The client side code generated by Axis2/Rampart does not print out SOAP 1.1 Fault messages. (This has reportably been fixed as of March 2007)

For security reasons, all SOAP messages are signed and communication from a client to the Tomcat server is via https. A description of all the necessary keystores and configuration files can be found in the Message Security notes.

Log4j logging

Both Tomcat and Axis2 can be configured to use Log4j logging. OSCARS also uses log4j. The various configuration files that are used are explained here.

ANT
Java build tool. We have targets for configuring the Tomcat server, generating the Java web service stubs from the WSDL file, compiling the code, testing the code and depolying the OSCARS war, aar and documentation.

Dojo

The Dojo toolkit is used by the new experimental OSCARS broswer interface. The latest release can be downloaded from here

A much more complete description of how to install and configure all these packages can be found in the OSCARS-DRAGON Installation Manual.