Simple Instant Messaging and Presence Service Installation

  1. The archives for SIMP Service are included in the distribution, however, you can build the system from the sources as follows:
    1. Make the jmk script with the command make jmk.
    2. Build the system with the command jmk. Emacs users should issue this command using M-x compile.
  2. For each server you plan to run:
    1. Create a directory with the following files: simpserv.jar, sax.jar, xp.jar, simpserv.props, and simpserv.sh. The servinstall.sh script does the copy for you.
    2. Copy the file simpserv.props into simpserv.properties and use this file for local modifications. The file contains comments suggesting some of the available options.
    3. Create an account file. Each line consists of a user account name followed by a password separated by the equals sign. The default name of the account file is passwords.properties.
    4. Create a default profile and access control list (optional). Create an account and use a client to set its profile and access control list. The server will record the information in the files <user>_profile.xml andone m <user>_acl.xml, where <user> is the name of the account. Make these the default by renaming them to notifier_profile.xml and notifier_acl.xml respectively. We found that users expect to see some empty groups when they first log into the system. The file notifier_profile.xml can be used to provide the initial set of empty groups.
  3. Create a client download directory reachable via HTTP 1.1:
    1. Create a directory with the following files: simp.jar, sax.jar, xp.jar, simp.props, makefile.jmk, simp/simplauncher.jar, simp/simp.sh, and simp/install.sh. The webinstall.sh script does the copy for you.
    2. Copy the file simp.props into simp.properties and use this file for local modifications. Change the simp.path line to a semicolon separated list of URIs that access the files: simp.jar, sax.jar, and xp.jar.
    3. Build simplauncher.zip with the command make or jmk.
    4. Copy the files index.html and text.css and edit them to fit your needs.

Security Note

In our environment, we trust the web server that distributes JAR files. In addition, we assume clients connect to the web server via a network that permits rapid client downloads when the cached client is out of date.

You can build a system that only uses JAR files installed on the client. When creating simplauncher.zip, remove the simp.path line in simp.properties and add simp.jar, sax.jar, and xp.jar to simplauncher.zip. Start the launcher with all the needed JAR files in the Java class path. For example, a Unix version of the command to start the launcher follows.

java -cp simp.jar:xp.jar:sax.jar \
     org.mitre.simp.launcher.SimpLauncher