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I will be installing and evaluating two Open Source EJB servers, Jboss and JOnAS. In addition to some simple profiling I will be attempting to deploy and run some EJB's for a virtual community. Initial tests will be done in a windows environment and once a selection has been made, I will be installing the winner in a Linux production environment.
The installation and startup of JBoss was pretty straight forward. I downloaded JBoss-2.4.3_Tomcat-3.2.3.zip from the download area. I unpacked it into a jboss directory on my machine, ran the script in the bin directory, run_with_tomcat.bat and JBoss started without any errors. Pretty simple, in fact, monkey simple. The real test will be when I try deploying a bean without the JBoss documentation. JBoss charges for their documentation, $60US for a complete set which includes a draft copy of thier new book by SAMS publishing. I am going to try and set up JBoss initially without buying the docs, but the price is reasonable and if I run into any trouble I will be purchasing them online.
OK, so much for that idea, after messing about with JBoss and looking for some simple tutorials on the net, I decided to just go ahead and purchase the documentation. $9.99YANK for the basic pdf download. Its worth it. The documentation is very thourough and provides several examples that I will be attempting. The examples require you to be familiar with Ant, download it and install it from the Jakarta site.
Installing Ant on Windows was dead easy, just download and extract it to a directory of your choosing. Once the files have been extracted, there should be a bin directory. Set this bin directory in your windows path variable. Do so by clicking on Start, settings, control panel, and clicking on the system icon. Under the advanced tab there is an environment variables button, click it. Under the system variables, edit the path variable. Add the bin directory here, click ok and your done. Make sure that you have the JAVA_HOME variable set as well, it should be in the system variables. If not, create it, pointing to your jdk installation home directory. If you dont have java installed, go back to step one...
Enter JOnAS, a Java Open Application Server. I knew it wouldnt be long before another open source application server hit the java community that has enterprise potential. Check out the documentation and follow my trials and tribulations here as I attempt to install it and use it for a virtual community application. These instructions are written assuming you have A JDK and Database installed on your machine. I have installed MySQL and JDK1.3.1 from sun.
My hardware:
This just meets the requirements for JOnAS 2.4.4. The download was a tgz file so I needed to extract it with winzip to a temporary directory and then install it from there. No biggie really, I just want to prove that all of this can run in a windows environment before I install it on my Linux server.
After decompressing JOnAS, I set my environment variables for JONAS_ROOT and my PATH permanently in the windows environment variables. You can do this in Start, Settings, Control Panel, and clicking on the System icon. Select the Advanced tab, and click on the Environment Variables button. Here you can set the required settings for JOnAS, JONAS_ROOT and an addition to the PATH variable.
Check that JOnAS has a proper environment to work in. This is done by running the CheckEnv.bat in the %JONAS_ROOT%/bin/nt directory.