Veni, vidi, visa - woes and victories in orion installation

[Katrina Owen]

"we came, we saw, we bought"... Head First Servlets and JSP.

The servlets assignments loom closer, and in preparation for this, I installed orion. Ah... it sounds so innocent, said in such a manner. In truth, that statement hides an epic tale of sweat and confusion.

First of all, I downloaded and installed j2ee without jdk, because sheesh - I have been developing stuff in java, so obviously I have jdk, right? Well, probably, but for some reason, j2ee_no_jdk did not recognize any of the places I told it to look for the java runtime environment. So I went ahead and installed the entire enterprise edition with jdk. Oh, well, I have loads of space on this box. What's a little redundancy going to hurt?

Then I downloaded orion, and did about seven installs... No luck getting it running no matter where I pointed my browser and which ports I had orion use. After a few more blind alleys, I realized that I probably should be doing this as root, and less than five minutes later, the BeeServlet actually said 'buzz'. I felt like a hero.

Of course, I couldn't just have a shiney new web server on my computer and not use it for anything, so I decided to complete the first servlets assignment. Lo and behold, the code produced the expected result.

But I had no idea why it worked, so I went on to solve the next one as well, hoping that a light bulb would ignite. Amazingly, I managed to produce functional code for that one as well, but no lightbulb. And that is where visa came in: Head First Servlets and JSP on amazon.co.uk.

I am so going to get the hang of this!

[Carol Murphy]

I just love you! Your post echos my own experience and confusion with servlets and jsp and that horrible feeling one gets when they make something work, but they don't know how or why it works!

[Ulf Dittmer]

I haven't been through the Cattle Drive myself so I may be off-base here, but whenever someone posts that he/she has problems installing J2EE and Orion -and I remember quite a few of those posts-, I keep thinking that that's a lot of trouble just for getting a servlet container. In comparison, Tomcat installs easily -just unzipping the archive really-, and doesn't need the additional J2EE download. Am I missing something? Do the assignments use any special Orion features, or is there really J2EE stuff (as opposed to Servlet stuff) going on?

[Katrina Owen]

I think that I wouldn't have had so much trouble with j2ee if I had installed j2se manually in the first place rather than getting it via the distribution system I use to update my linux box. Seriously - installing j2ee was a simple matter of making the file executable and then running it. If I had done that with the JDK earlier, I would have files in the right format for j2ee to recognize.

As for trying to install a web server in my incredibly non-permissive user account rather than doing it as root - that is just silly. The installation was very easy: download. unzip. make a symbolic link to the tools.jar (or copy it. whatever). Start server.

So as they say around here "skyld s� sj�l!" (blame one's self).

In the servlets part of the drive I don't think there are any other EE aspects. Not sure about the database section, though (can you do database with the regular jdk?).

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

We had a similar conversation earlier here, and came up with this:

Originally posted by Marilyn de Queiroz:
Here's an idea that works for me, Adam. Take the j2ee.jar out of your classpath and add orion.jar (from the orion install directory) to your classpath.

Can you compile? I could.

[Marilyn de Queiroz]

Originally posted by Katrina Owen:
In the servlets part of the drive I don't think there are any other EE aspects. Not sure about the database section, though (can you do database with the regular jdk?).

You can use database stuff with the regular jdk. In fact, we start off the jdbc assignment page with that. However, the assignments use jdbc in conjunction with servlets and jsps.

Orion is much simpler to use than Tomcat in my opinion.