Toolkit initialization implications

[Robert Olson]

I'll be committing AccessGrid.Toolkit soon. I wanted to drop folks a note 
on how things may have to change in order to support some of what we want 
to do.

The Venue client will have the following code in its initialization. Any 
wx-based app that wants to use the certificate mgmt framework will have to 
do something similar:

         self.app = Toolkit.WXGUIApplication()
         self.app.Initialize()

That's it; what that does is set up the cert mgmt infrastructure such that 
it'll bring up the wx dialog to create a proxy if one is not available, and 
it will set up the process's environment accordingly. The certificate menu 
items are hooked in thusly:

         gui = None
         try:
             mgr = Tookit.GetApplication().GetCertificateManager()
             gui = mgr.GetUserInterface()

         except:
             log.exception("Cannot retrieve certificate mgr user interface, 
continuing")

         if gui is not None:
             certMenu = gui.GetMenu(self)
             self.menubar.Append(certMenu, "&Certificates")


Because this sets up the environment, any process that is created by the 
client will run with these credentials *if* the process does not do any 
other initialization.

However, I recommend that each of our apps should indeed perform explicit 
initialization.

The following code is now in the venue server. identityCert and identityKey 
are to be filenames, passed in on the command line (via the new --cert and 
--key options). What this does, if the options are passed, is to initialize 
the security environment to force the use of that cert/privkey for the 
server's identity. Otherwise, it sets up the environment as "usual", but 
uses a command-line interface to create a proxy if one is needed.

if identityCert is not None or identityKey is not None:
     [sanity check elided]

     #
     # Init toolkit with explicit identity.
     #

     app = Toolkit.ServiceApplicationWithIdentity(identityCert, identityKey)

else:
     #
     # Init toolkit with standard environment.
     #

     app = Toolkit.CmdlineApplication()

app.Initialize()

If you want the app to explicitly inherit the environment, initialize like 
this:

    app = Toolkit.ServiceApplicationInheritIdentity()
    app.Initialize()

I have not made the changes to the individual services. I recommend that as 
part of the work to make them startable at boot that, like with the venue 
server example above, they take command-line arguments for explicitly 
setting the certificate and private key. I think the default of inheriting 
environment should be fine; this is what the personalNode stuff currently 
depends on and it appears to work fine.

--bob