Thursday February 09, 2006

Creator 2 Applications and Glassfish;-)

It simply works. I like that

In Creator export your application as a *.war file for a J2EE 1.4 compliant container.

Download Glassfish (I used build 9.0-b32f) and get it up and running. Bring up the admin console and deploy your war file as every other war file. Point your browser at the URL and enjoy

If you need some help to configure the resources for your application, there will be a tutorial (for Application Server 8.1 - but the steps are the same) on the Creator site soon. That's the beauty of blogs. I can quickly post something here, but the tutorials have to go through a lengthly review and publishing process.

Have fun,
-- Marco

( Feb 09 2006, 04:49:09 PM PST ) Permalink

Creator 2 @ Gentoo Linux ;-)

First the standard disclaimer:  That's not officially supported but it's just Java, right

This came up on our Creator Forum. People tried to install Creator 2 on Gentoo Linux and that did not work so well.

I'm using  Linux since somewhen  in 1993 /1994. I used to copy stacks of floppies for the installations. So I thought, one more Linux distribution can't be too hard to install and get working. But I have to say, Gentoo is not exactly what I would recomment for starters It takes a long time to configure and rebuild the world before you can do something useful, especially when you try to do that experiment on a scrap box (P3 500MHz/512MB). I think once you have your setup and you know your way around, it's probably not much harder (or better) than any other Linux distrubution out there. But getting to that point takes time.

My final system was a basic Gentoo system with KDE installed. It says:

marco@gentoo-mw ~ $ uname -a
Linux gentoo-mw 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 #2 PREEMPT Thu Feb 2 08:59:21 PST 2006 i686 Pentium III (Katmai) GenuineIntel GNU/Linux
marco@gentoo-mw ~ $ cat /etc/*release
Gentoo Base System version 1.6.13

Now I needed some extra preparations for the installation of Creator.  One thing, the installer of the bundled application server needs a specific libstdc++ to run. So I found the sys-libs/libstdc++-v3 package which should help with that. So I installed it (the symbolic link was to make sure, the installer would find the name it expected):

gentoo-mw ~ # emerge sys-libs/libstdc++-v3
gentoo-mw ~ # cd /usr/lib/libstdc++-v3/
gentoo-mw libstdc++-v3 # ln -s libstdc++.so.5 libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3

But that did not help yet The ld.so.conf contained all the right directories and the ld.so.cache seemed to be updated but for whatever reason, the installer could still not find the library.  So I created another symbolic link:

gentoo-mw libstdc++-v3 # cd /usr/lib
gentoo-mw lib # ln -s libstdc++-v3/libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 .

Now the installer was happy.

But the final application server would try to start and then fail. It turned out, my hostname gentoo-mw was not updated with the IP address from DHCP So a ping localhost was fine but a ping gentoo-mw would not know how to resolve the name The application server is trying to use both and failed.

So I used a trick I'd seen on my SuSE systems. They update the /etc/hosts file when the dhcp client gets an IP address. When there is no DHCP available (on a disconnected laptop for instance), they give the hostname an IP address 127.0.0.2. So I tried that on this Gentoo box and it seems to work just fine

gentoo-mw ~ # fgrep gentoo-mw /etc/hosts
127.0.0.2       gentoo-mw

Now a ping gentoo-mw worked fine and the application server was ready to start.

I did a couple of installs and uninstalls until I found all the problems but for you, it should now just be a simple install (as the user who will use Creator!):

marco@gentoo-mw ~ $ ./creator-2-linux-en.bin

I hope this helps some people to use their favorite Linux distribution

Have fun,
-- Marco
( Feb 09 2006, 10:24:50 AM PST ) Permalink