About Scone

Architecture

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Documentation

Examples

Related

How to Download and Install Scone

We developed Scone in hope of having a stable, full-featured framework to build and evaluate navigation tools. Scone was put under the GNU GPL to allow other developers in the field of Web usability and hypertext research to easily use and enhance Scone. The latest version is 1.2.1 (see below), which is distributed as a .zip-file containing the sources, a binary-only .jar file and most necessary libraries.

Platform:

• Windows NT, 2000, XP (recommended), or Vista
• A Unix OS like Solaris or Linux.
• MacOS X also works well.
• Scone was also tested on Windows 95/98 but we do not recommend this platform. We offer some tips for Windows 9x users, though.

It has been tested with the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer 4, 5, 5.5 or 6
• NetScape 4.x,
• Mozilla 1.x,
• Firefox 1.x (recommended!),
• Opera 6.x, Opera 7.x

Most functions are supported on all these platforms and browsers. However, the access logging and the browser control works best on the Internet Explorer 5 to 6 and Netscape on Windows. For all other platforms only the simple AccessTracking (see Documentation) is currently available. We plan to support Mozilla as well; however, its LiveConnect implementation still has a serious bug (valid for Mozilla 1.0 - 1.7 and Firefox 1.0; Jul-2004).

Downloading

Scone is available as zip-file including the following packages: MySQL Connector/J 3.1.10, the acme-tools, httpclient, htmltokenizer. See the related work page for more information.

Download Zip-File (11.5 MB) Version 1.2.1 from 2. February 2009

You also need:

• Java^TM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE^TM) Version 1.2 or later (Version 1.5 recommended).
• The WBI-Development Kit (only free for non-commercial use).
  If you have problems to download WBI, please contact us!
• MySQL - A performant database system. MySQL is used for object persistency.
• Apache ANT - The Java-based build tool for Java makes compiling Scone easier.

Optional:

• Horst Heistermann's HTMLWindow-Component - This performant Web browser was fully written in Java. We use it to generate thumbnails.
• Google Web APIs - Google offers a SOAP-API in Java to access its search services.

Installation Instructions

You need some experience to install Scone, as you have to install and configure some other packages. If you feel competent, please follow the following steps to install Scone:

1. If not already present on your System, install the Java Development Kit (JDK) first. If you use Windows XP you also have to install the Java Runtime Environment to enable Java in the Internet Explorer. More Information on the JDK and its installation is available from Sun.
2. Install Scone by unpacking the downloaded zip-archive to a directory of your choice.
3. Install WBI by unpacking the WBI-archive in the run directory of scone. The name of the target directory has to be wbij45. (an directory with this name, a readme file and some essential configuration files can already be found there.)
4. Install MySQL 4.0. MySQL is not mandatory, but several functions of Scone are not available without database, like persistent objects and advanced queries. You should set
   set-variable = max_allowed_packet=16M or for mysql 4.1 just add
   max_allowed_packet=16M to the [mysqld]-secction
   in the my.ini file. (See setup directory of Scone.)
5. Install ANT if you want to use our build file.

Compile Scone

If you want to compile Scone, you have to go to the build directory and call ant.bat (or ./ant.sh for Unix). The appropriate build.xml-file for Scone can be found here.
Tip: It may be necessary to setup some environment variables, depending on your system configuration. Look at setenv.bat for an example.

Configure

1. If not already running, start the MySQL daemon mysqld. Setup the Scone database fron the definitions that can be found in setup/sconedb.sql. This can easily be done by calling
   mysql scone -u root -p < sconedb.sql and
   mysql scone -u root -p < setUserRights.sql
   from the command prompt.
2. Configure your browser: You have to set the proxy of your browser to localhost:8088 (if Scone runs on your local machine). It is also recommended to disable the hard disk cache of the browser and set it to "check page for update at every access". For the Internet Explorer you can find the additional registry file Config_IE_5+6_For_Scone.reg in the setup directory (just double-click it).
3. Register Scone-Plugins in WBI. Use "runScone.bat -g" in the run directory. In the WBI-GUI use "Plugins"->"Register..." and select scone.reg from the setup-directory.
4. Configure Scone with "runScone.bat -config" in the run directory. Here you can select the required plugins and configure the base components of scone.

As example plugins, the StatusbarWizard from the tutorial is installed and the RobotMonitor, which can be accessed at the virtual address http://_robot.scone.de/.

Run Scone

• To start Scone, call runScone.bat in the run directory. (./runscone.sh)
• Test the Scone by using your Web-browser. If the active Plugins use the access tracking, the browser will be redirected to the Scone login-Screen to register a new user.
• Tip: You can start runScone.bat -g to enable WBIs GUI. This is very helpful for debugging, as the active components (MEGs) and all transferred data can be observed.

Further Information

We have another version of Scone using the Poet t7 object oriented database on request.

For more Information please contact Harald Weinreich
Last Update: 02-Feb-2009