`Sunrise/sunset today' channel for iPlanet portal server

What is this?

This is a simple custom channel for use with the iPlanet Portal Server desktop. It displays the sunrise and sunset times for a selected city on the current day. The `help' page contains information about how these figures are calculated, and the significance of the different types of sunrise and sunset. On the desktop the channel looks something like this:

When the channel is installed, the administrator can set the default zone; however, the channel has no way to predict where a particular user is sitting at the time: it could be anywhere in the World, not necessarily in the same geogrphical location as the Portal Server. Therefore, the use can click the `Edit' button and get a simple selection screen like this:

The user's selection will remembered for future sessions.

Installation

Unless you plan to change the Java source code, it should not be necessary to compile anything. Simply copy the included Java class files to somewhere that iPortal can find them, and the help file to the iPortal Web server's public HTML directory.

On a Unix system, you can use the included scripts to do this. For this to work you must edit the script siteconfig.sh, as this defines the installation locations, which differ from site to site. After this, you can run the scripts:

install.sh	copies the classes and help files to the server
register.sh	registers the channels attributes with the profile server

Note that these two operations are independent; registration need only be done once, even if the Java is recompiled.

Now you can use the admin console to make the new channel available to users. In the Application | Desktop profile, find the channels section; the name and class for the channel are `kevinBooneSuntimes' and `com.web_tomorrow.iportal_suntimes.Suntimes' respectively.

Gotchas

This software cannot provide meaningful data if the Portal Server's date is wrong!

Bugs

Oh, yes, undoubtedly. If you find any, please alert the author.

Author and copyright

iportal_suntimes was written by Kevin Boone and is (c)2001 Kevin Boone, all rights reserved. Code is distributed under the GPL; there should be a file called `COPYING' in this distribution which sets out the GPL licence terms in detail.

This code is distributed for educational purposes; there is no warranty of any kind, and the author will not accept any responsibility for any consequences of its use.