Random thoughts on differences in APS 11.1.1

I have come along on my Essbase 11.1.1 install and plan to start a series on the installation but, at this point, I started looking at Analytic Provider Services ("APS") to setup my development environment. Our Dodeca product talks to Essbase through APS and, although I have compiled our Essbase service against 11.1.1, I am starting work to support the new features of Essbase. These are just some random notes I had while reviewing APS.

The directory structures for the Essbase product appear to have been reverted back to the pre-System 9 naming conventions which is great. I never liked the 'Analytic Administration Services' subdirectory name and highly prefer 'eas'.

The essbase.properties file is much more organized than in 9.3.1 but has significantly fewer configurations that in the previous version.

Tomcat is still the 'batteries-included' application server for now. I wonder how long it will be until some version of WebLogic is delivered 'out-of-the-box'. The version of Tomcat that is shipped has changed from 5.0.28 to 5.5.17. Further, it appears that support for running Tomcat in a Window is no longer delivered. This last item is going to have a significant effect on me as I normally run Tomcat in a window during development so I can see my web services data flowing in/out of the server. Tomorrow, I will have to look at how 5.0.28 was configured in 9.3.1 and emulate that in this version. Ironically enough, the infrastructure for 5.0.28 is still delivered in the aps subdirectory structure but it looks like it is not used anywhere.

The APS command line console is available and works but it looks like the default username/password has changed. It used to be that you had to login with the system/password combination, add a username that matched a username in your Essbase system, disconnected and logged back in using the new username. In 11.1.1, I logged in using admin/password. I don't know, however, if that is the default username or if it is the username/password combination I used during my setup/configuration.

Numerous times during my work so far, I have seen numerous references to the previous product numbering system. For example, in the APS\bin directory there is a file named css-0_9_5.dll which, of course, refers to the fact that EPM 11.1.1 originated as System 9.5.0. I have seen a number of people say they would wait on installing 11.1.1 as they wouldn't install a initial release; I wonder if their opinion would be different if it were still named 9.5.0?

There are a number of new external libraries shipped with APS now. The jar files that look new to me include ldapbp.jar, commons-codec-1.3.jar, commons-httpclient-3.0.jar, jakarta-regexp-1.3.jar, jakarta-slide-webdavlib.jar and (maybe) jdom.jar. Most of these are from the Apache project including the commons and jakarta jars.

My first compile of our Essbase servlet with the 11.1.1 client jars worked without a hitch. In the next day or so, I will be updating our build scripts for building a production version of our servlet with 11.1.1 support. As the code hasn't changed, I don't expect any issues during our QA testing cycles.