Building an Off-line Kit
From DOC
Overview
Tolven normally distributes software via plugins. When a plugin is ready, it is available to the public (or some other audience) in a process called publication. Plugins reside in what Tolven calls a plugin catalog. Plugins are then available to a program called getPlugins (sometimes called repositoryInit). This program's job is to determine which plugins need to be pulled into the target installation (repositoryRuntime) folder which then constitutes the exact plugins that will be used in your configuration. Since the plugin catalog resides on a server on the internet, this style of installation procedure is called on-line. repositoryInit must be able to connect to whichever catalogs it has been configured to look at.
An off-line kit is really just a variation of the on-line kit which has been modified to read from a catalog or catalogs on the local system. In effect, creating an off-line kit is nothing more than downloading all versions of all plugins to a local machine and reconfiguring tolven-config/plugins.xml to look at this local repository location. This approach requires another step to distribute plugin updates. On the other hand, an off-line catalog provides a completely stable snapshot of the plugin catalog.
The resulting off-line kit does not need to be limited to use on a single system. For example, if you have several Tolven systems in an intranet, you can create a sort-of hybrid on-line-but-fully-inside-the-firewall kit so that all Tolven systems in the intranet access a single, coordinated catalog.
One important point when building an off-line catalog. This approach is not meant to allow you to modify or add to a Tolven catalog. If you want to have a catalog for your own plugins, then that is simply another catalog. tolven-config/plugins.xml contains a list of catalog URLs and it would be normal for you to add the location of your own catalog, even if it only contained one or two plugins. In fact, Tolven comes pre-configured to look at a catalog called tolven-config/repositoryLocal which is intended to hold plugins created on a single development workstation prior to publication to a more widely available catalog.
Building a catalog snapshot for off-line use
If you have not done so already, you will need to install the plugin manager project, usually done into Eclipse, but all you really need is Ant and the build file contained in that project. See Developer's Guide.
Use the createCatalogSnapshot target to create a snapshot of each catalog.
If you select a target catalog that already exists, then it will only add the missing plugins to the target catalog.
In this example, we will use a snapshot directory name corresponding to the version of Tolven. For V2 users, there will be two catalogs, each is snapshot separately.
tolven-V2.0.19/v1/catalog tolven-V2.0.19/v2/catalog
Access a catalog snapshot
Accessing a snapshot is no different from accessing the live catalog except that the tolven-config/plugins.xml file points to a different location. Originally, they will point to the Tolven catalogs:
<property name="repositoryLibraryURL" value="http://tolven.org/download,http://tolven.org/download/v2/catalog,..." />
You will change the repositoryLibraryURL locations to point to your snapshot:
<property name="repositoryLibraryURL" value="http://myserver/tolven-V2.0.19/v2/catalog,http://myserver/tolven-V2.0.19/v2/catalog,..." />
Or, simple file-based locations:
<property name="repositoryLibraryURL" value="file:///tolven-V2.0.19/v1/catalog,file:///tolven-V2.0.19/v2/catalog,..." />
It is very important to realize that once an off-line catalog is created for a particular location, it cannot be moved to a new location. This is because the plugins.xml file for a catalog contains hard URLs to the plugins in that catalog.
The next time you run getPlugins (repositoryInit), it will use the local snapshot.
