Open BlueDragon Admin Console Update

The Open BlueDragon admin console is coming along nicely, and as has been true since the first commit to the Google Code site, everyone is more than welcome to grab the code and give it a try. One of the hallmarks of a truly open source project is transparency, so although development is still underway, anyone who's interested can always see what's going on by grabbing the source code, reading the commit comments, or jumping over to the Open BlueDragon Google Group to share your thoughts.

Be aware that we're still working rather furiously on things at the moment, so here are some caveats for any of you "early adopter" types out there. ;-)

1. Obviously since it's not complete and currently has no security in place, we do NOT advise using the admin console in its current state on a production or otherwise important instance of OpenBD. That being said, if something does get screwed up it's typically easily fixed by replacing your bluedragon.xml with a good version, so if you're in any way concerned, back up bluedragon.xml for safekeeping, or you can always grab the backup that's automatically generated by OpenBD (bluedragon.xml.1, etc.)
2. To reiterate and expand on the security point in mentioned above, there is no security either in terms of logging into the admin console or using the admin API CFCs. It's WIDE OPEN. You have been warned. :-) We'll implement all this as a final step before official release.
3. If you see a glaring hole in functionality or huge error being thrown, chances are we already know about it, but please feel free to submit a ticket to the code site and include things like the Java app server you're using, OS type and version, Java version, and other relevant details. Particularly if an error is thrown that prevents you from using it at all let us know. Chances are in those cases I'm just expecting something to be in bluedragon.xml that isn't in yours for some reason.
4. Related to #3 above, don't feel like you have to submit a ticket for every single little problem you see, but certainly feel free to do so. We'll make a more formal declaration when we think things are done and ask people to test the heck out of it, at which point we'll absolutely want to know about every problem you have no matter how minor.
5. I'm not a designer. I don't even pretend to be a designer. I grabbed a template from oswd.org and ran with it. If you have comments on the design that's fine, but A) make them constructive, or B) if you have design skills, rather than spending time writing up what you think needs to be changed, spend your time making the changes you think would be nice and submit them for our consideration to use. All that being said, also remember that this is an admin console, and if you've seen things like the Tomcat administrator, CP+ or some of the other server admin consoles, etc. I certainly don't think this is any worse even at this early stage. :-) What I mean by that is let's stay focused on functionality and glaring design/usability problems for version 1.0 as opposed to more subtle nuances of style or usability. As this will be an ongoing project, we can always make it slicker in a future version and we already have lots of ideas about that. The main point is getting something in people's hands.
6. Feature suggestions are always welcome. The main features that aren't in the code at all at this point are collections, scheduled tasks, and web services (there may be a couple of others I'm forgetting). There are also minor points of the features that are in the admin console that either need to be implemented yet, or need cleaning up. Some of the more "monitoring" type features like listing and letting you kill threads, letting you see/clear the cache, etc. also have yet to be implemented. We have lots of ideas for future functionality but we'd love to hear what features you think would make this the ultimate admin console.
7. Please feel free to comment on the admin API CFCs in terms of CFC names, method names, how they work, etc. Also not that the admin API is not compatible with the Adobe ColdFusion admin API. We will likely build a compatibility layer on top of the OpenBD admin API CFCs if that's something people are interested in.

I think that covers the caveats for now--just be aware there's some tightening up to do on the code so while we encourage you to play around with it and give us some feedback, you likely WILL run into issues and annoyances at this point. We do appreciate any feedback you can give us either now or when we announce the "test the heck out of this" phase of development!