With the information from the previous sections, you should now know enough to perform an initial installation of sensors into your local development environment using the HackyInstaller GUI, and to verify that they are functioning correctly using the sensor-specific information in Chapter 26, Sensors. Over time, however, it is likely that new versions of the sensors (and of HackyInstaller itself) will become available. This section shows how to keep your client-side Hackystat software up to date.
As new releases of the Hackystat server come online, new versions of existing sensors and/or sensors for new tools may become available. While your initial hackyInstaller.jar file will detect the occurrence of updates to existing sensors, it will not detect the availability of entirely new tools. For this latter capability, you must download an updated version of hackyInstaller.jar from the server.
Each time HackyInstaller starts up, it checks the Hackystat server to see if an updated version of HackyInstaller is available, and if so, prints out a message to the Status Log indicating that a new version can be downloaded. Figure 2.10, “ Status window indicating a new version of HackyInstaller is available ” illustrates such a situation. Here the downloaded version of HackyInstaller is 6.8.930, but there is a more recent version (6.8.1007) available at the server. The Status Log window shows a "Warning" message, which indicates that you should consider downloading a new version of the hackyInstaller.jar file, as documented in Section 2.2, “Downloading HackyInstaller”.
When new versions of the Hackystat server are installed, you may wish to update your sensors to improve their functionality. Fortunately, HackyInstaller makes this quite simple to accomplish.
Figure 2.11, “ The HackyInstaller main window showing sensors in need of updating. ” shows a HackyInstaller main screen with several sensors in need of updating. To be in need of updating means that there is a newer version of the sensor available at the public server than that which is installed on the client machine.
While one could select each sensor, press the "Configure Selected Sensor" button, and then the "Update" button to download the updated version, it is also possible to simply press the "Update All Sensors" button on the main screen. This has the same effect as pressing the "Update" button for all sensors requiring an update.