[ZOO-Discuss] Happy new year ZOO Tribe

[Gérald Fenoy]

Hey ZOO Tribe Members,
happy new year !

I know I'm quite late to give news but I was really busy those previous days and will be even more in the upcoming ones :) Nevetheless, I'm please to make anounce about the ZOO Project ongoing work.

First of all, Bison + Flex parser of main configuration file and service specific metadata companion was updated to correct some leaks. There is still some strange issues with this specific component, so if anybody in the Tribe want to fix this stuff please go :)

What new about supported language for ServiceProvider (SP) ?

As we supported C and Python since the begining, we now support Fortran and Java also. For this last, we choosen the java.util.HashMap data type to store our original maps*, so in your Java ServiceProvider you'll only have to deal with this kind of data and roll them the way you want to :) For Fortran we choosen to use String matrix to store our original maps*. You can find sample code in the ZOO Project svn server or browsing using the ZOO Project trac system if you get relevant access. If you don't have and want one, please just ask us to get one.

To integrate those languages support for ZOO Kernel SP, we rewrite the code section which handle the dynamicaly loading, running then outputing to make the integration of new language support simplier We stay in the same axis, making user able to include new language support defining only 3 functions (one to run the process, one to parse from maps* to specific language datatype, and another one to do the same in the other way, converting specific language datatype to maps*), but we make the running process function thiner soe easier to read/write.

As we think it can be useful to get some environment variable been set by the Kernel before running a process from a loaded SP, we add this feature. Currently, to set env variables you only have to add [env] section in your main configuration file (main.cfg). Then, every KVP in this section will be set (or overwriten) as an env var. For instance, for processes which needs to get X access, you can set the DISPLAY env var in this section. Running Xvfb :11& and adding DISPLAY=:11 in the main configuration file.

As ZOO Server contains ZOO Kernel and also ZOO SPs which should be added after ZOO Server was deployed, we can also think that we can define a specific section in service configuration file (addEnv for instance) to store additional environment variables and keeping our initial modularity view intact.

I hope to hear from you soon,
best regards,


Djay
Just a ZOO Monkey
gerald.fenoy at geolabs.fr