
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.