Tools News – What's new in the APL Tools Group

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Introducing...The Dyalog File Server

Due to be released later this year, the Dyalog File Server (DFS) provides secure, multi-user access to APL component files and native files. DFS not only provides similar capabilities, but extends them as well. DFS is designed to run on both Windows and Unix-based platforms, and uses Conga, Dyalog's TCP/IP communications library to provide communications between the client running in the user's application and the file server.

The DFS client can provide a single interface to files served by the DFS server as well as files that are locally available. Multiple copies of the DFS client can be created by a single user to support multi-threaded applications.

Data security is an important aspect of many applications and DFS provides features to help protect your data. The first line of defence begins with moving your data into DFS where its access is controlled. DFS supports username/password style authentication as well as Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) on Windows platforms (see the IWA announcement later in this section). Additional authentication mechanisms can be added to DFS as their need is identified. Finally, secure communications can be used between the client and server using Conga's Transport Layer Security (TLS) support.

DFS provides a scalable file access solution. Multiple file services can be configured to help balance the usage loads. File services can be configured to provide access to different subsets of files; for instance, a file service could be configured to provide access to a single, high usage, file and other services can provide access to the rest of the file system. DFS is highly configurable and, when released, will have a web-based console to provide monitoring and administrative functions.

MiServer Updates

We continue to add features to MiServer, Dyalog's open source, APL-based, web server. The first is the addition of HTTP request logging. This is a feature found in other web servers such as Microsoft's IIS and Apache's Apache server. For every HTTP request received from a client, MiServer can log the IP address, validated name of the client, the time of the request, the request itself, the number of milliseconds MiServer spent to service the request, and the number of bytes in the response to the request. This information can provide valuable insight on the usage patterns and performance of your website.

The next feature we're very excited about is support for the jQuery Mobile library. Expected to be released this summer, this feature will allow you to develop web interfaces designed for mobile browsers.

Another feature to be released later this year is ability to run MiServer as a mapping handler under either IIS or Apache servers. This enables you to combine the gamut of features provided by these web servers with the power of APL delivered by MiServer.

MiServer 2.0 is available for download at our website.

Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA) in Conga

Conga's forthcoming version, 2.3, includes support for Integrated Windows Authentication (IWA). IWA is one mechanism that can be used to provide Single Sign On (SSO) under Windows. With IWA, a user's Windows Domain credentials are used to authenticate the user to a server without having to enter another set of logon credentials.