Confidential, for evaluation only.

Marimba Channel Admin Tool

NOTE: This document is a context-sensitive help document for the publish channel administration program included with the Marimba Castanet release. It presents help for different portions of the publish program. Reading this page out of context might be confusing.

Introduction

Channel developers use the publish program to create, administer, update and delete channels on transmitters. In the normal lifetime of a channel, it will be created, modified repeatedly and then deleted. Those operations are supported by publish program.

The publish program can help you administer multiple channels at once. Press Channels to go to the list of channels that are currently under development.


Channels under Development

All the channels you are currently developing are listed here. You can edit a channel's properties by double-clicking the entry in the channel list, or by selecting it and pressing Edit.

If you already know the channel's properties, you can directly update your channel by pressing Publish. If you wish to delete the channel on the transmitter, press Delete.

When you want to start developing another channel, you can press Add to get started. You will be prompted for the name of a directory where your channel is stored. When you are no longer developing a channel and which to remove it from the list, you can press Remove.


Specifying Transmitter Options

Each channel must has an associated transmitter where the channel is stored and updated. You must specify the transmitter host and port where you will be storing your channel.

In your working directory you may have Java source files as well as many other files that you don't want to be made available on the transmitter. You can accomplish this by specifying comma-separated file extensions in the Ignore field. E.g., to ignore all your Java source files as well as all the backup files in your directory, specify the ignore property as *.java,*.bak.

Finally you must specify the administration password for your transmitter. See the transmitter admin help page for information on how to specify a password for your transmitter.

The publish command remembers one destination transmitter for each channel at a time. It is possible to store and update channels on multiple transmitters by publishing one channel and then changing the transmitter and performing another one.

Any time while you are specifying properties for your channel it is possible to press Publish or Delete to update or delete your channel on transmitter. If you want to see the updates that would occur, without actually performing those updates, then press the Preview checkbox.


General Channel Information

In the general channel information page you fill out information such as the name of your channel and the type of channel. And depending on the type of channel, you must fill out other information relevant to that type. For example, if your channel is an Applet then you are required to specify the code attribute, which is the name of the applet. You also must specify the applet width and height just as you would if you were preparing the applet for running inside of a browser.

Note that if your channel type is Application and it's also a Bongo presentation, then you must specify the presentation attribute in the parameters property page.


Channel Update Intervals

Marimba channels are updated automatically by the tuner at regular intervals. It is up to the channel developer to decide how often is appropriate the particular channel. A headline news application, for example, might choose to update ever 10 or 15 minutes. A travel tool application, which doesn't change very often at all, might update once a day or once a week.

When the channel is running, the tuner updates it at regular intervals as defined by the Active parameter. When the channel is stopped it is also updated, but at the interval defined by the Inactive parameter. When set to never the channel is only updated manually by the end user.


Channel Contact Information

The channel contact info is your chance to take credit for your efforts, OR, your chance to pretend you had nothing to do with your channel. It depends on how you feel. The Channel Properties command on the tuner will display these attributes as you specify them.


Channel Description

The channel description is a piece of text which can be as long as you like. It will be displayed by the Channel Properties command in the tuner, as well as by browsers and tuners that list the channels on the tuner.


Channel Parameters

Any additional properties for your channel should be entered here. The format is simply key=value pairs, one per line. If your channel type is an application, this is where you would specify all the parameters for your applet that you would normally specify in an html page with the <param> tag.