Marla Parker's Weblog

With bits and pieces of time last week, and then a big chunk of my weekend, I managed to install the Wonderland server on my MacBook Pro laptop. I wrote these notes for myself as a way to reconstruct what the heck I'd done:

• Verified that I can run Wonderland as a client on my laptop.  Used the Wondertown server, which is part of the ISIG group.  It was not the first time I'd played with Wonderland.  I was not sure whether I had ever done it on this laptop before, but I must have because the minor glitch for Mac OS X was already moved aside per the instructions.
• Followed the instructions to download and install the Wonderland server.  But I overlooked the instructions to set sgs.host in my.run.properties, maybe on purpose because at that time I was only trying to set up the server to run on my machine for the benefit of a client running on the same machine.
• Ran the Wonderland server, which meant starting three different processes, and I think the order matters.
• Finally ran the Wonderland client, but this time by launching it from my local machine, not from a JNLP file on a (much less my) server.  I logged in as me, no password, and found myself stuck in an empty world with an irregular barren earth type landscape and blue sky.
• Encouraged by my minor success, I moved on to Installing Wonderland Web Administration.  Not because I wanted to serve up Wonderland to other machines from my laptop-as-a-server, but because I want to try out the building worlds and uploading art.
• The first step, download the server, I'd already done.  So far so good.  But then it sent me right back to that same page for the Wonderland.war file to download, one of two (with or without local art).  After a moment of déjà vu confusion, I discovered the next to last column, Web, just before the final column, Documentation, indeed contained the two .war files.  So I downloaded the smaller one.
• The next instruction was a very short section, merely: Install the .war file in your web container.  I know what a .war file is and what a web container is, but I've never installed one, I've never even installed an application server (except, I discovered, as a side effect of installing NetBeans).  I chose Glassfish over Tomcat or Jetty because the instructions were the shortest.
• Good choice, because I discovered I already had the latest release as part of a recent upgrade that I did of the full NetBeans release.  But the default domain is, not surprisingly, a developer domain.  So I had to create a cluster domain in order to be able to deploy a .war file.
• After several mistakes, I successfully created domain5, started it, and logged in to the web administration page for glassfish, and deployed the Wonderland.war.
• The next instructions I should edit slightly.  They say: "In your Wonderland server install directory, open the my.run.properties file and add two properties:" but there is no my.run.properties file in the server install directory, it is down two levels.  Did not take me that long to find it (in Contents/Resources), but I did have to search for it.
• Next I started the Wonderland server again.  Did not try using the jnlp to access the server that I had deployed before installing the .war file, but that is such a corner case I don't care if it would have worked or not.
• Next I went to my local machine:8080/Wonderland and sure enough, got the launch page that looks just like the one at Wondertown, only this one was running on my server.  I clicked Launch and was able to login just like I had done twice before, getting the same barren world as I did running the client directly on my laptop instead of via the jnlp file.  Phew!
• Then I thought: hmmm, would this work from my daughter's PC?  It was Saturday, she wasn't around, so....  but I failed.  It loaded the application but she (I as she) could never get the login to complete.  Turns out that was indeed because I had skipped the step above, setting sgs.host in my.run.properties.  This time it worked!

Now it is time to try to install the WonderlandWorldBuilder.

I spend a few hours every two weeks doing some internal communications work for a volunteer group of Sun employees working with Engineers Without Borders here in the SF Bay area. I make an agenda and take copious minutes for our bi-weekly call, edit our wiki, and I talk with people internally about potential EWB projects that might dovetail nicely with actual work projects at Sun, such as engaging students in projects using Sun technology.

So far, we have exactly one official EWB project, which means we successfully submitted their sixteen page project proposal form (daunting at first, but worthwhile in the end) and won their approval. The project, Wifi4CREA, aims to bring cheaper, faster, and more reliable internet access to the CREA - Panama reseach station in the Cocobolo Nature Reserve. CREA = Conservation through Research Education and Action. The improved connection will serve the researchers, the school visits to the center and lastly the local village. One of the other volunteers, Marco, has pictures and information about his trip to Panama here on his blog.

Through our local EWB San Francisco Professional chapter, the wifi4crea project was selected to represent EWB on a really cool site I did not know about before: Global Giving, a million little earth-changing ideas. We have until November 21st to raise $2k via this site, so please contribute! No amount is too small nor too large. We will use the funds to purchase the hardware we will install on the next trip to Panama, possibly as soon as January.