magpiebrain

I decided to spend my Sunday afternoon giving “Seraph”:http://opensource.atlassian.com/seraph/ a go. Seraph is “Atlassian’s”:http://www.atlassian.com/ opensource web application securty framework. Upon downloading I found that it depends on “OpenSymphony’s”:http://www.opensymphony.com/ (website tagline: “Quality Components”) “OSCore”:http://www.opensymphony.com/oscore/, and “OSUser”:http://www.opensymphony.com/osuser/, nether of which it includes in its downloads (despite the fact that specific version numbers are mentioned in the “dependencies”:http://opensource.atlassian.com/seraph/dependencies.html). No problem I think, I’ll just pop over to OpenSymphony to grab the latest OSCore and OSUser jars. Unfotunately you can’t. No download links, nothing. I eventually find in the OpenSymphony Wiki that the only way to actually get them is via CVS (and I only found this page via a Google search). Already I’m a little concerned – Seraph seems to be at a relatively early stage of development and is dependant on two apparently immature libraries (if all you provide is a CVS source download, you aren’t what I would call ready for prime time). Having already spent a little time at this I thought I should go one step further, so I fire up SmartCVS and download the repositories. Both OSUser and OSCore build easily enough, and not knowing much about either I decide I should look for some documentaion. OSUser contains little – the online API docs are broken, there does’t appear to be any docs in CVS, and the example app doesn’t build, and there is nothing like a quickstart guide (which was so helpful with Hibernate) so I have no way of knowing how the bloody things works.

Anyway trusting that the versions of OSUser and OSCore in CVS will work with Seraph, I’ll spend a little longer seeing if its worth going any further with it. I don’t hold out much hope…