Forum OpenACS Q&A: Setting up the dream dev server

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1: Setting up the dream dev server
Posted by Jade Rubick on 06/26/03 06:54 PM
I'm going to be setting up a developmental server over the next couple of days. I'd like to set it up as an ideal developmental environment -- slick as can be.

The hardware itself is not the issue, but setting it up well is. For example, should I set up multi-mode emacs? What is the best .emacs file out there for production purposes? What about setting up the developer tools?

I'm going to document what I do to set this up (I've become religious about documenting almost everything I do with OpenACS), so if you could post something in this thread about your recommendations, I'll add them to the document if I end up using them.

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2: Re: Setting up the dream dev server (response to 1)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 06/26/03 07:32 PM
I recommend setting up a virtual hosting environment, so that you can assign unique project names to the servers and address them accordingly, e.g. http://myproject1/, http://myproject2 etc. and don't have to fiddle with port numbers.

This gets especially useful when you have a webinterface to manage these server instances, so you can start and stop them from the browser and have one page that links to them all. I know one guy who has written a simple webinterface for daemontools for internal use at my previous company - if you're interested I'll ask him to upload it somewhere.

It would also be nice if these instances could selectively be made available online, so that you could e.g. open http://myproject1.mydomain.com/ for the public or only for the IP address of a client, but that involves some control over DNS and was not implemented at that setup unfortunately.

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3: Re: Setting up the dream dev server (response to 1)
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on 06/26/03 08:06 PM
Jade,

I highly recommend using Emacs. I've been working on a number of improvements to make Emacs more of an OpenACS IDE. See my articles at http://www.thecodemill.biz/publications/articles/ for example. I'll be updating those soon and be adding more.

Recently I've explored Emacs skeletons, abreviations and autotype. With these modules I can now insert ad_proc skeletons when I type adproc. The skeleton inserts a basic ad_proc definition including parameters, author and creation date. Thanks to autotype new .tcl files in /tcl/ directories start of with a ad_library header while .tcl files in /www/ open with ad_page_contract.

Stay tuned.

/Bart

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4: Re: Setting up the dream dev server (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on 06/27/03 08:07 PM
Hi Bart,

I tried to access your site, can't get in... 408.  Anyway maybe we can have a nice .emacs out there that we can distrobute with openacs?  From what I know DanW also has a good one.  I am just a very novice emacs user even though I used ever since for ACS and OpenACS.  I would be nice though if I can copy and paste some of your .emacs files.

The skeleton you described will greatly help.

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5: Re: Setting up the dream dev server (response to 4)
Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on 06/27/03 10:25 PM

Hmmm. My server came to an halt due to this error:

alloc: invalid block: 0xaa2b7c8: 38 b ef

Has anyone seen this error before? I can't relate it to anything else in the log file.

Jun, have patience, I'm finishing up my skeletons and other Emacs settings. A new article will be published soon.

/Bart

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6: Re: Setting up the dream dev server (response to 1)
Posted by Jun Yamog on 06/28/03 10:37 AM
RAM problem perhaps?

Anyway looking forward to your article.