[Spacewalk-list] Spacewalklib: managing Linux systems from Java applications

[Alfredo Moralejo]

  Hi Miroslav,

On 01/03/2011 01:19 PM, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
> On 01/02/2011 10:40 PM, Alfredo Moralejo wrote:
>> I've called it spacewalklib and I've created a project in sourceforge
>> for it http://spacewalklib.sourceforge.net/
>>
>> As it's primarly intended to manage client systems, I've focused in the
>> client management more that in the tool management itself (for example,
>> I did not implement channels creation or cloning yet), however
>> additional features in future may be added if required.
>
> Can you please enlighten me, how it differ from classic Spacewalk API? 
> Why should I use this and not API?
>

The reason I started thinking in creating a Java lib that uses the API 
is that many datacenters orchestrators, as vmware or hp (former opsware) 
ones uses Java as primary languages to extend their out of the box 
capabilities, and integrating spacewalk or satellite on it would be 
something nice for some organizations.

Having a library that implements the part of the API that can be more 
useful in these scenarios can make much easier the access to spacewalk 
from these tools. I did not think in creating a full API implementation, 
but the part that I think is most relevant for the integration on this 
Java based tools, oriented to entire datacenter automation. In my case, 
when I implemented the processes in jBPM, using spacewalklib made it 
much easier that having to implement directly the XML-RPC calls.

IMHO, if you are going to integrate satellite from any Java based 
application, having the library makes it easier to understand and 
implement. Anyway, I may be wrong.


> Additionally reading javadoc I find:
> >RhnClient(RhnConn rhnconn, java.lang.String hostname)
> > Constructor class.
> This is not good. You can have two clients with the same hostname 
> (e.g. localhost.localnet). You should identify clients by systemID.
>

Yes, you are right. However, note that one of the main uses would be 
related to self-service provisioning tools. In this case, using the 
systemID is not very friendly, as the final users do not know it 
usually. It'd be like using SystemID to identify the systems in the Web 
UI of spacewalk. In fact I think, we can have a similar problem when 
using the web interface, I may see several systems with the same name. 
Anyway, I'll think what could i do to fix it.

Thanks for your feedback,


Alfredo



-- 

Alfredo Moralejo
Red Hat - Senior Consultant
RHCE, RHCVA, RHCA

Office: +34 914148838
Cell: +34 607909535
Email: alfredo.moralejo at redhat.com

Dirección Comercial: C/Jose Bardasano Baos, 9, Edif. Gorbea 3, planta 
3ºD, 28016 Madrid, Spain
Dirección Registrada: Red Hat S.L., C/ Velazquez 63, Madrid 28001, Spain
Inscrita en el Reg. Mercantil de Madrid – C.I.F. B82657941