[Tilesathome] Batik, and batik-agent

[Knut Arne Bjørndal]

Hi

I'm currently reworking the svg2png part of tilesGen (don't worry,
I'll keep it in a feature branch :) ), and I have some questions about
batik and the agent:

1) tilesGen currently has three ways of running Batik: through a
wrapper, directly running the jar in java and the agent. I'm thinking
about doing autodetection on which method to use, is there any reason
why that would be a bad idea somehow?

1B) I'm guessing a wrapper should be the last resort only if we can't
find the jar file, as we can't set javas -Xmx then, rigth?

2) Batik agent seems to do some logging to the STDOUT or ERR of the
agent server, and some to the file specified with log= on the inet
socket. I'd really like to avoid creating logfiles at the place in the
program I want to put this, would it be possible for it to dump that
output to the network socket instead?

3) The network socket listens openly to everywhere and doesn't do any
authentication or anything at all, which means anybody that's able to
reach a machine running the agent over tcp/ip can make it use loads of
resources, and even overwrite any files the user running the agent has
write access to.

At the very least only listen to the local interface, and you really
need some way to authenticate the user that's connected as well. I
know it's possible on *nix, and for example postgres uses it for
authentication, doing something sensible in java that will also work
on windows is not something I know how to do.

4) I had some problems getting the agent to work at all, does it
require the area= parameter or something? That really should be
optional unless you don't care about using it for anything other than
t at h.

-- 
Knut Arne Bjørndal
aka Bob Kåre
bob+osm at cakebox.net
bobkare at irc
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