On Identity and Security

The release of NetBeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 Beta includes the web archive (war file) of Access Manager 7.1 Beta. The war file is placed within Sun Application Server's install directory under "addons/amserver" as "amserver.war". By default NetBeans installation deploys the war file within the Application Server under the URI "/amserver".

However the war file can deployed in other servlet containers. Once deployed within the servlet container, the first access to the web application provides a very simple configuration page. Configuration takes less than a minute and Access Manager is ready for use.

The directory to store the Access Manager's configurations is the most important parameter. After installation this directory can be backed up as needed to recover back to a know state. BTW, this assumes that the data store used to manage identities is "files".

Instructions to uninstall Access Manager can be found in NetBeans Trouble shooting guide under "NoClassDefFoundError: cannot access amserver occurs during installation". Basically the steps are to undeploy the web application and to remove the configuration directory. Additionally, Access Manager maintains a bootstrap file $HOME\AMConfig_server_amserver_, the last component being the deploy URI. This file must also be deleted. However before redeploying Access Manager, the servlet container must be restarted to clear the initialized static variables.