Installation

This server (Perl) has been superceded by the PHP server. Please note that this Perl server supports the Java UI but not the Javascript UI.

Pre-requisites

To get a store window embedded into your webpage, all you need is the ability to run CGI scripts on the server and an applet on your web-page.

For the CGI scripts to work, you need Perl and the perl module called CGI.pm.

For the applets to work, the clients need to use an applet-enabled browser, examples being Mozilla, Netscape Navigator (4.x) and IE (4 and above). The client applets are Java 1.1 compatible.

Please make sure the versions of server and client match.. the 1.3.0 server would be needed for the 1.3.0 client.

Client

The store window is an applet. Upload the floranta.jar file found on release site to a convenient place. To embed the applet in your webpage, add the following applet tags to your webpage:

<APPLET
CODE="com.floranta.ui.shared.CommunicatorApplet.class"
ALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0 ARCHIVE="floranta.jar"
NAME="CommunicatorApplet">

        <PARAM NAME="server" VALUE="http://floranta.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/floranta.cgi">

        <PARAM NAME="nextPage" VALUE="http://floranta.sourceforge.net/developers.html">

        <PARAM NAME="pausePeriod" VALUE="600">

</APPLET>

<APPLET
CODE="com.floranta.ui.simplestorewindow.RuedigerAppelStoreWindow.class"
ALIGN=BOTTOM WIDTH=540 HEIGHT=298 ARCHIVE="floranta.jar">

        <PARAM NAME="channel" VALUE="C">

        <PARAM NAME="announce_visitors" VALUE="true">

</APPLET>

Replace the strings in italics with the relative locations of your applet archive, server script and page to go to after a period of inactivity, respectively. The client is now ready for use.

Server

Upload the floranta server script to the cgi-bin directory of your server (changing cgi-dir permissions to 755). (The server is a perl CGI script that can be run from either the cgi-bin directory or the scgi-bin directory. Make it executable and verify that the perl interpreter's path is valid on the host.)

Create a subdirectory called temp and give it read-write permission 777 (700 should work in the scgi-bin dir?). This is where the temporary files created by the server are stored. The contents of the directory can be completely deleted from time to time. In fact, it would be a great idea to configure a cron script to do that to files that haven't been touched for four hours. The floranta server currently does not clean up the temp directory.

Well, that's all. Installation complete!

We are working on developing security mechanisms that do not affect the usability of the system. Will have them available in at most two weeks, and the system will have an easy install procedure, so watch this space.

License Agreement

All the code is distributed under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). All rights to graphics and any artwork distributed with the code remain with their authors.