Forum Discussion

Nimbostratus

Jan 21, 2008

Just started with BIGIP and icontrol

Hello all My goal is very simple, but need to know where to start BTW I am not a big time coder as well OK here we go, have a BIGIP in my test environment, how do I programatically crea...

Jan 21, 2008

Since our iControl interface is a set of standard SOAP interfaces, pretty much any language you choose to write your application in will work. We have samples for perl, java(Apache Axis), C, and VB in the SDK to get you started.

The first step will be choosing a language you are comfortable in and have the development tools for. I can't really answer that question for you.

Next step is to get all the prerequisites for your given toolkit to support SOAP and SSL. For Perl, you'll need SOAP::Lite and Crypt::SSLeay. For Java, you'll need Apache Axis and the Java JSSE libraries, for .Net everything is included in the installation of Visual Studio.

We've got a few quickstarts available along with some video tutorials on the iControl tutorial page

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=83

Click here

If you've chosen Java or .Net, then we have some helper libraries that make development very easy. Take a look at the iControl Assembly Labs project

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=68

Click here

Documentation for the APIs as well as sample code are available online in the iControl Wiki

http://devcentral.f5.com/Wiki/default.aspx/iControl/HomePage.html

Click here

And you might want to download the latest SDK for more samples as well as a portable documentation set.

Hopefully this is enough to get you going.

Good luck, and let us know if any questions come up.