Bitnami

Bits to Me, nay Bitnami

I have been working on an experimental website for some time; (actually, about 5 years!). It is based on php 5, implementing a web calendar (a branch of icalendar 0.9.5 using up to 7 different .ics files), a now defunct wiki called TigerWiki 2.18 using .txt files- that had as its claim to fame being able to run in 3 files!. The suite is able to pull in daily weather forecasts and UV forecasts from the Australian Bureau of meteorology for 3 locations (as a filtered mashup) as well as manage a large number of teacher timetables (stored as text files).

I have also been working on integrating the calendar with the wiki. For example, the wiki adds the markup [diary:<year>-<month>-<day>]. I am also working on integrating quality iPhone support, in that when an iPhone or iPod Touch is client is detected, the request will be redirected to alternate pages, rather than just send the originally requested page.

You will notice the absence of a reference to a database application. All of the files are text files and rely on the underlying OS for security.

At the client end, I have been able to directly connect a Filemaker Pro 7 (and very recently Filemaker 10) database to iCal on my machine through Applescript, with iCal then connecting across the network to the stored .ics files on a web server. This means I can

• pull down a list of the calendars, select a particular calendar, upload an event into that iCal calendar automatically from Filemaker Pro
• have iCal automatically update the .ics files stored within the Web Server tree (protected using WebDAV)

The resulting calendaring information is then able to be distributed via a web server. Information is updated within 1 minute using a javascript page pull command. For the interested, include this javascript command in each page you wish auto updated(reloaded):

id = window.setTimeout("location.reload()", 30000);

This approach means the link stays asynchronous, and does not require state maintenance at the server end. And you don't have to get involved with AJAX.

Until now I have been using the pre-installed Apache 1.3, Php 5.x (upgraded from 4.x), and MySql 5.x. which is well "integrated" in the system, especially Apache and MySql through the System Preferences, using the Command Line Interface for maintenance.

Recently I decide to try the base BitNami MAMPStack for Apache 2.x and php 5.x and MySql (for PPC Macs) to see how easy it was to install, uninstall, and also edit the config files. Firstly, it is a breeze to install. The installer is a normal Mac installer. The main differences are that ALL files are installed in a base folder, of your choosing. An un-installer is also installed, so you just double click and it will sweep up all of the installed files. One other really good feature is that a Mac applet is included so you to easily manage Apache and MySql. It is really a small GUI front-end to the Command Line Interface, and gives you click start and click stop and the ability to easily manage the operation log. The distro stack includes many plug-in modules for Apache, and all config files. They are relatively untouched and can be edited easily with TextEdit which is a bit different from the pre-installed version.

The only difficulties I had was to transport the website (about 2GB as a single copy of a root folder and subfolders) from my working system to the root folder of the new system. You have to read the documentation to determine where that is. With a few edits I was able to get the whole site operational under the BitNami stack in well under 1 hour. I thought that was reasonably impressive. Y11-Y12 students could, with some help, get a site up and running.

Now, several days later I wanted to add BitNami's Wordpress to the site. I downloaded the Wordpress module rather than the whole stack. This is where things became interesting- I was going to spend a lot of time working out how to get MySql working properly , and Wordpress integrated. MORAL OF THE STORY, if at all possible download and install the whole lot in one go. This will save you some time and much frustration in that at least you will start with a basic working model.

I recommend trying BtiNami's stacks for Windows, Mac, Solaris, Linux. They appear to have put a lot of time and effort into building their models and making sure you have a good start for customisation. Oh, and they are of course FREE to download.