The current generation of mobile devices is not conducive to traditional "heavy clients" such as the Novell Client for Windows. Their operating systems do not allow for access to the networking stack or login processes. Nonetheless, NCP provides a variety of services that are both not duplicated by other "open" technologies and which confer advantages specific to a Microfocus OES environment. Such capabilities include but are not limited to salvage, eDirectory operations beyond those given by LDAP and its extensions, XML-RPC operations to modify the OES server directly, multi-namespace access on NSS and many others as detailed in the NCP SDK documentation.

In order to provide rich NCP functionality to mobile devices and other "web-centric" platforms, I propose the creation of NCP libraries giving access to basic NCP client functionality. These libraries should be accessible from the most common programming languages used on the web including (in rough order of necessity) Javascript (ncp.js), PHP, C#, Perl, Python, and Swift. Java is not included here because some Java NCP functionality already exists. If Microfocus would like to go for the ultimate in synergy, COBOL might also be added. Per common convention, where possible the library might be written once in a universal language such as C and bridges made to each scripting language (i.e. PHP, Python, etc.)

This would be useful to any organization with OES servers that wants to make them accessible by either the web or by mobile devices (I can see myself using the Javascript piece to create OES access applications for Chromebooks to do things like salvage).

This differs from Filr because it provides simpler, more direct, flexible access to OES. It also allows a larger range of operations, especially if some NCP calls that are not currently implemented on OES become available to that platform.

These libraries may provide an alternative means of NCP access to Linux, if the Linux client is fully deprecated.

by: Johnnie O. | over a year ago | Novell Client