[ome-devel] OMERO.server (BETA) 4.0 RC1 announcement

[josh.moore at gmx.de]

Hi everyone,

as promised, an update on the upcoming release. We've just tagged
release candidate 1 for internal testing (url below). You are welcome
to start examining the tag or downloading from Hudson, but obviously
there is still work to do and changes to be made.

In order to use this pre-docs version, some explanation is necessary:

 * First, the database has "evolved" as opposed to clearly being
   versioned during our development, so anyone who has tested the
   waters will need to re-create their database.

 * Another important change is how the database gets created. To
   simplify the distribution, ant has been removed, which means the
   "ant setup-db" target is gone. For the moment, we are delegating
   database creation to your tool of choice (probably psql). See below
   on how to do this.

 * The logging location has changed. Deployment starts up at least two
   server instances, one with a lower memory requirement, solely for
   indexing your database. To prevent confusion from duplications,
   there are now two files. See var/log/Blitz-0.log and
   var/log/Indexer-0.log after starting your instance.

 * Finally, server configuration has changed. Rather than editing
   local.properties and executing "ant update", Java's Preferences API
   (e.g. ~/.java/userPrefs on Linux) is being used (see below). This
   keeps the distribution directory (other than the logs) read-only so
   it can be installed globally.


The final workflow, which we will be writing up online for release,
can be summarized like this: (note this assumes that Ice, Java,
Python, and Postgres are already installed)


    svn co \
      http://svn.openmicroscopy.org.uk/svn/omero/tags/omero-4.0-rc1 \
      omero-4.0-rc1

    cd omero-4.0-rc1
     # Calls "java omero" to prevent memory issues on 64bit
    ./build.py
    cd dist

    #
    # All default properties are shown in etc/omero.properties
    # If you would like to change any property, use the
    # "bin/omero config" command.
    #
    bin/omero config set omero.data.dir /opt/OMERO
    bin/omero config set omero.db.user me
    bin/omero config set omero.db.name mydb


    #
    # To create a password script which also contains your
    # (OMERO) root user's password, use the "bin/omero db" command
    #
    bin/omero db script    # Asks for root pass and creates OMERO__4.sql


    #
    # Postgresql commands:
    # ==========================
    # These commands assume the default values as in etc/omero.properties
    #
    sudo -u postgres createdb -O omero omero
    sudo -u postgres createlang plpgsql omero
    psql -U omero omero < OMERO4__0.sql


    # Starting your server
    bin/omero admin start
    # No deploy needed.


Once "OMERO.blitz now accepting connections." appears in your
var/log/Blitz-0.log, you can browse to:

  http://localhost:8000/webadmin

and begin adding new users.


Known issues:
=============

 * Server builds on Windows but will not deploy properly.

 * To get the Eclipse projects to compile, it is necessary to run
   "ant test-compile".


Thanks ever so much for your patience and and the upcoming
feedback. And, as always, we'll keep you posted on the further release
schedule.


Best wishes,
Josh