PlasKit is a toolkit for use with the
PLASTIC protocol.
It contains a hub implementation, utility classes which make it
painless to invoke or serve PLASTIC requests via either RMI or XML-RPC,
some command-line tools useful for debugging and monitoring purposes,
and a few other components, such as a ListModel
implementation which reflects the PlasticListeners currently registered
with the hub.
The package is fairly lightweight, and has no external dependencies other than the RMI-lite and XML-RPC implementations.
Note: This software is experimental, and hasn't been tested to destruction. The hub implementation may or may not match the current or any other version of the PLASTIC standard. Currently, the PLASTIC hub implementation recommended to the PLASTIC community is the one provided in the AstroGrid ACR (see http://software.astrogrid.org).
This software is released under the GNU Lesser General Public License.
The following classes have main methods which mean they
can be invoked from the command line. Slightly more information can
be found in their javadoc entries.
Hub implementation with optional logging to standard output and/or graphical display.
Usage:
uk.ac.starlink.plastic.PlasticHub
[-verbose] [-warn] [-gui]
Registers with the hub and monitors traffic. Can log (barely) human-readable messages to standard output describing PLASTIC traffic and/or display a graphical indication of currently registered applications. Can connect to the hub using either RMI or XML-RPC protocols (the latter is only really useful for testing the XML-RPC mode of a hub).
Usage:
uk.ac.starlink.plastic.PlasticMonitor
[-xmlrpc|-rmi] [-gui] [-verbose] [-warn] [-multi] [-name name]
Makes one-off requests to the hub from the command line.
Usage:
uk.ac.starlink.plastic.PlasticRequest
[-sync|-async] [-regName name]
[-targetName name ...] [-targetId id ...] [-targetHub]
[-clientId id] [--]
messsageId [args ...]
Runs unit tests against a running hub, and exits with an error status (and stackdump) if any of the assertions fails. Should be improved to give rather more useful messages.
Usage:
uk.ac.starlink.plastic.HubTester
You can pick up the classes either as separate jar files:
plastic.client namespace).plastic files on Windows.XmlRpcHub (mainly for testing purposes).CustomTransportFactory implementation;
this provides better error reporting than the xmlrpc-2.0 version
in some cases.HubTester class.