Release notes

PageBox

PageBox for Java

API

Demo

Background

PageBox 0.0.10ter

Application server installation

PageBox allows dynamically installing Web applications on target applications. We provide a Tomcat installer that we tested on Linux and Windows XP with JWSDP 1.2 and Tomcat 4.1.24.

Application server installers like the Tomcat installer use two parameters in rules.xml:

target. A Web archive called myarchive.war will be inflated in $target/myarchive
root-path. A Web archive called myarchive.war will be installed on URL application_server_URL/$root-path/myarchive.

On Linux use an absolute target path, for instance:

<target>/usr/local/jakarta-tomcat-4.1.24/webapps/PageBox/deployed</target>

On Windows XP use a target path relative to the PageBox installation directory, for instance:

<target>PageBox\deployed</target>

Resource definition

On Tomcat (including the JWSDP flavor) we define a JDBC resource like this:

<name>factory</name>

<value>org.apache.naming.factory.DbcpDataSourceFactory</value>

</parameter>

<value>pageboxa</value>

</parameter>

<name>password</name>

<value>pagebox</value>

</parameter>

<name>maxWait</name>

</parameter>

<name>maxActive</name>

</parameter>

<value>jdbc:mysql://localhost/pageboxa</value>

</parameter>

<name>driverClassName</name>

<value>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</value>

</parameter>

<name>maxIdle</name>

</parameter>

</ResourceParams>

Factory

The factory depends on the combination Application server / Operating system.

Tomcat 4.1.24

JWSDP 1.2

Linux

org.apache.commons.dbcp.

BasicDataSourceFactory

org.apache.commons.dbcp.

BasicDataSourceFactory

Windows XP

org.apache.naming.factory.

DbcpDataSourceFactory

org.apache.commons.dbcp.

BasicDataSourceFactory

JDBC driver

At least with mysql-connector-java-2.0.14 and on Linux Tomcat 4.1.24 seems to ignore the user and password parameters in the ResourceParams element.

The simplest circumvention consists in setting the user and password parameters on the URL:

jdbc:mysql://hostname:port/dbname?user=value1&password=value2...

Permissions

It is possible to start an Application server with a security manager. You can start Tomcat (including the JWSDP flavor) with a security manager with the -security option.

In case of dynamic deployment it seems that JWSDP 1.2 doesn’t use catalina.policy. The drawback is that this prevents compiling JSPs.