RAD's Enhanced Storylines Product Editor & Creation Tool - The Storylines Server Problem

[dan-bowerman]

The Issue

We need a solution for running Storylines as a robust service running on a managed server (i.e. we don't have direct access to where it is hosted).

The Current Situation

We are leveraging Express Server, which via node command in a Windows command prompt run from a local Administrator account. This works fine as our "Beta", as Dan can maintain this directly through his Azure Sandbox VM, starting and ending the service as needed to troubleshoot and update quickly. This option will not exist in a traditional/post-beta deployment.

The Server runs independently of the RESPECT Editor webpage. Its primary function is to receive, write, and compress files prepared in the RESPECT Editor [Is it used for anything else?]

We have some console logging that shows when users access a product and save/upload it. This can be written to a logfile and expanded upon.

This will sit on internal infrastructure. For this phase, we can focus on getting things running in Dev before we concentrate on internal QA or Production deployments.

What We Need

• A solution that is amicable to RAD and WIG
  • It's very possible we can still use Express, we just need a better solution than running it from a console!
  • Manageable through IIS?
• Improved logging and exception handling
• Guidance materials for WIG (how to deploy, how to restart if there's issues, etc)

Other considerations

• Is the Server used exclusively for writing? Do we want to worry about authenticating service calls, or should we just let the RESPECT interface handle and log that? Could be security implications with this approach, but we are never going external with this application, so it might be fine as an iterative phase.
  • R&D: LDAP/Active Directory authentication #241
  • RESPECT Editor: File Saving and Loading #60