Distribution Envelope Tools 1.0 RC1

Damian Murphy (damian.murphy@nhs.net)

18th May 2013

This package contains a set of classes for parsing and building ITK
distribution envelopes and their payloads. The original was written in
Java and is used in the ITK Testbench (to provide support for testing
"Correspondence" messaging), and the ITK Routing Components. A port to
Microsoft .Net 4.0 using C# is also provided here. Both have a common
set of API comments, which can be extracted using Doxygen.

The Distribution Envelope Tools support text and binary payloads and are 
provided for developers working on ITK and related projects either to
include in their products, or to use as an illustration of techniques
included in the ITK distribution envelope. In each case the code supports
both the production and consumption of the payload contents. These include:

- Base64 encoding (including when to do it)

- GZip compression (including when to do that - since a compressed payload
  must also be base64 encoded for carriage in XML so the compression ratio
  obtained must be better than 1.34 times.
  
- Payload encryption for one or more recipients, and the related payload
  signing.  
  
- Population and use of the "manifestItem" data associated with a payload.
  
- Construction of ITK Infrastructure Acknowledgments, and NACKs, based on
  an existing distribution envelope instance (plus, for NACKs, an Exception)
  
A "Distribution Envelope Helper" is provided to parse received XML. The
helper also provides a method to parse payloads though this is called
separately when required.

The code is licenced under the Apache Licence, version 2.0:

Copyright 2012 Damian Murphy <murff@warlock.org>

   Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
   you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
   You may obtain a copy of the License at

     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

   Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
   distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
   WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
   See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
   limitations under the License.

What is in the pack:

- Java 1.6 and C#/.Net 4.0 sources plus supporting XSL transforms.
- API comments extractable as documentation from both using Doxygen

Dependencies

Java 

JRE 1.6 or later
"WarlockUtils.jar" (included)
Apache commons-codec-1.3.jar (Not included)

C#

Microsoft .Net 4.0 runtime