Simal - User Quickstart

Introduction

Simal is an open source tool for building project registries. Simal uses the Description of a Project (DOAP) schema to collect, store and present data about projects. Simal is available under the Apache software License V2 .

This document describes how to download and install Simal on your local machine. We are concerned here with the latest binary release of Simal, if you want to work with the latest development release you'll need the developers quickstart . If you just want to see what Simal can do then you probably want to view our demo server .

Warning
Simal is very young at this time, it works, but is far from feature complete. As such, we welcome input into the requirements and design of the initial system via our mailing list .

Pre-Requisites

In order to run Simal from the command line all you need is Java JRE 1.5 +

If you want to run the REST API or the Web application you will also need a servlet engine such as Jetty or Apache Tomcat.

Downloading

All our releases are available on our developer site . Visit that page and download the module you want to use, each module is described below:

Note
You only need to download a single module as all dependencies are included in each module.
  • simal-web provides a web interface to the Simal repository. This is ideal if you wish to provide a human interface to the repository.
  • simal-rest provides a REST interface to the Simal repository. This is ideal if you wish to write your own front end to a Simal repository.
  • simal-core contains the minimum you need to work with Simal, that is the repository and command line interface for interacting with that repository. This module is ideal if you wish to write scripts and other low level applications for working with the repository.

Running

How you run Simal depends on which module you have downloaded.

Simal Web

To run the web application simply drop the simal-webapp-VERSION.war into your chosen servlet container and point your browser at http://localhost:PORT/simal-webapp-VERSION

It should be notes that the web application bundles Simal REST with it. The endpoint for RESTful requests is http://localhost:PORT/simal-webapp-VERSION/simal-rest

Note
If you are not running on localhost you will need to configure the application accordingly.

Simal REST

Simal-rest provides a REST interface to the registry. simal-webapp-VERSION.war into your chosen servlet container and point your browser at http://localhost:PORT/simal-rest-VERSION

Then point your browser at http://localhost:8080

Simal-core

Simal-core provides a command line interface to the repository. It is intended to be self documenting. Run the following command to see the documentation: 

  java -cp
    simal-core-0.2-jar-with-dependencies.jar
    uk.ac.osswatch.simal.Simal -h

Getting help

Our documentation is minimal at present. If you can't find the information you need on this site please search our user mailing list archives . If you are still lost then join us on our user mailing list where we will be glad to answer your questions.