12/1/2008

Brian and Jon installed PURLZ on Jon's Mac laptop using the PURLZ 1.2 JAR file; installation was a simple series of steps initiated by double-clicking on the Jar file.

Notes

• PURLZ 1.2 wants to run on port 8080, so we had to shut down Tomcat
• we chose the option of using MySQL, using an established user account. The database (purls) must be created for the service to start up; we specified "character set utf8" when creating the database, though nothing was said to indicate that was necessary.

Comments

• The application has a functional and attractive interface; we were each able to create user accounts and then make domains and PURLs using those domains; the few PURLs we created interactively worked correctly.
• However, establishing a domain seems to be flaky – a number of domains were established without warning or error messages, but could not then be used to create PURLs and could not be found through the domain search tool, which reported "Search Successful" but "No Results". An option to list domains and their attributes would be very helpful

Problems with batch upload (bdc34):

I have not been able to do a batch creation of PURLs
using PURLZ 1.2. I am using curl to do an authentication and then a POST and I get a cryptic error message as a result.

$ curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt -d "id=bdc34&password=test&referrer=doc/test" --url http://corson-mac.mannlib.cornell.edu:8080/admin/login/login-submit.bsh $ ./generateXml.py 1000 | curl -b cookies.txt -c cookies.txt --url http://corson-mac.mannlib.cornell.edu:8080/admin/purls -d @-

generateXml.py is a python script that generates output like:

<?xml version="1.0"?> <purls> <purl id="/tld/subdomain/test0" type="301"> <maintainers><maintainer id="bdc34"/></maintainers> <target url="http://example.com/test0"/> </purl> </purls>