Introducing Smans data server

First of all, Smans is a Web content management system (CMS) focused on small mobile devices, PDA and telephones. Smans server possesses the administration tools, quite sufficient to support the multi-user hosting for users of cell phones. Managing Smans HTML forms is only a part of Smans server features.

Smans server version 1.9 actually is dynamic Web application or a set of Java servlets. So before, you need to install Web application server supporting Java Servlet 2.3 and JSP 1.2. It may be Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, or any other (http://resources.coreservlets.com/jsp-servers.html).

Smans data server is distributed as a Web application example, wapp, packed in ZIP file, smans-ds.zip, which may be downloaded from Internet, http://smans.sourceforge.net. Most important inside of wapp is WEB-INF directory, necessary for any Java Web application:

wapp
  ...
  WEB-INF
    web.xml
    lib
      savz.jar
      smans-ds.jar
      activation.jar
      mail.jar
    smans
      sys
        account.sdb
        catalogue.sdb
      data

The web.xml is a Web application deployment descriptor. You as administrator can change some web.xml parameters in the future, first of all email account. The library directory (WEB-INF/lib) contains JAR files. The smans-ds.jar file is library of Java classes including servlets, which directly provide the work of Smans server. The savz.jar file is a class set of a separate Sav Zigzag database system. This DBMS is featured by flexible structure, which in turn influences on the Smans server features, namely dependence of a database structure on the structure of HTML form. The activation.jar and mail.jar are necessary only for Web container like Tomcat. Usually Web application servers contains these email libraries.

Important and obligatory for Smans are WEB-INF/smans/sys/account.sdb and WEB-INF/smans/sys/catalogue.sdb files. The account.sdb keeps information about users and their accounts. Another catalogue.sdb file keeps catalogue in form of data tree, which structure usually is coincident to file structure. User by means of Web browser can navigate through the catalogue and then pass to concrete file. To keep file hidden for Web browser, you can create it inside of WEB-INF/smans/data/. All deployed (installed) wapp files, except for WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/web.xml, make up an example of Smans data, which helps you to understand the work of Smans server.

To deploy any Web application, you need to know features of each application server. Let's consider Tomcat. Even this server (container) has several ways. A simple variant of Smans server deployment is copying smans-ds.zip/wapp directory in <tomcat>/webapps. To start Tomcat you may use startup.bat in <tomcat>/bin directory. Smans server will start automatically. Then you can address to wapp application from a Web browser through http://localhost:8080/wapp/servlet/login and login as user with test name and test password. See details in ReadMe.html.