iControl assembly into Netbeans??

Auh.. I may be running in circles here…

 

 

My goal is to have an external application do some basic control of an F5 GTM. My understanding is that I can use iControl and java to accomplish this task. It’s been a while, but I do know how to use Visual Studio and VB, however, I just discovered that VS2010 doesn’t really do java that well so I am going to work with Netbeans. From what I have found on Devcentral, there are downloads for Java binaries (iControl Assembly) and downloads for Java wrappers (iControl Wrappers). The wrappers DL contains a doc files that explains how to load, how about the assembly?

 

 

Do I use one or both of these sets of files in the Netbeans IDE.

 

I would recommend using the iControl library for Java, not the wrappers. The Wrappers were a project to provide a few use cases around the core APIs contained in the iControl library for java (iControl.jar). The wrappers do not provide the entire API set and you may not get all the functionality you need. For instance, I believe it's just LTM centric so there aren't any GTM based wrapper methods in there for you.

 

 

The iControl Library for Java is the entire iControl method set compiled from the WSDL definitions and packaged with a container class that makes accessing the methods very simple.

 

 

There are no javadocs for the iControl library for Java as we rely on the iControl API documentation on DevCentral to serve all the languages we support. We tried to make the API docs very language neutral so reading the docs should be fairly straightforward.

 

 

As for integrating the library for Java, you just need to add the iControl.jar as a reference to your project. You will likely need to add the 3rd party libraries in the distribution as well (axis, etc).

 

 

Then in your code to access the methods, you instantiate a iControl.Interfaces object, initialize it with your credentials, and then access the various iControl interfaces with their accessor methods. The following example is all the code you need to access the LocalLB.VirtualServer interface's get_list() method to return a list of the virtual servers.

 

 

iControl.Interfaces interfaces = new iControl.Interfaces();
interfaces.initailize("bigip_address", "bigip_user", "bigip_pass");
String [] vs_list = interfaces.getLocalLBVirtualServer().get_list();

 

 

Hope this helps...

 

 

-Joe