Rogue Wolves

Recently I've had to do some SOA development using Java and Tomcat. I've never dipped my toes into Java web service development so it's a new world to me. Compared to ASP.NET it seems very convoluted with many different frameworks and conflicting/incomplete/outdated tutorials. I ended up using Axis2 as the framework but wanting to develop on OS X I had to install a servlet container to host my web services. I also wanted to integrate this into Apache for various reasons. After some research and searching here is a process I came up with to install Tomcat on OS X using Apache.

These instructions are for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) with JDK 1.5 and Tomcat 5.5:

Step 1: Download Tomcat and JK source

You can download Tomcat from this link

In order to integrate Tomcat with Apache you need to use the JK Apache module. I downloaded the source for the module and compiled it. You can download the JK Apache module source from this link

Step 2: Install Apache Tomcat

First unpack apache tomcat (double click the file in the Finder) then move folder to /usr/local (or optionally /Library)


sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.20 /usr/local


Next create a symbolic link in /usr/local for tomcat. I do this to make it easier to update tomcat versions later.


sudo ln -s apache-tomcat-5.5.20 tomcat


Step 3: Build and install the JK module for Apache

Unpack JK module (double click the file in the Finder) and then open a Terminal and change to the directory that contains the JK source code native directory. You need to build the module from source code to do this issue these commands:

I recently made the jump to using Subversion as my version control system for my various software projects. If you haven't made the jump I'd recommend you consider it and say goodbye to all your CVS headaches. Check out this article on Subversion tips for CVS users. If you use Visual Source Safe you have my sympathies and you have even more reason to checkout Subversion... (yes that was a horrible pun)

But this post isn't about being a Subversion cheerleader, it's about finding good tools for Subversion on OS X. You can install Subversion for OS X by downloading Martin Ott's Subversion package. This will give you the command line subversion tools, but who wants to work solely on the command line? Thanks to a post by Boris Mann I found out about SvnX - a nice GUI front-end for the command line tools. Install both these and you have some nice tools to work with Subversion. The best part it's all free.

I also found a Subversion client for OS X called SCPlugin that integrates into the Finder similiar to TortoiseSVN for the Windows shell. It looked pretty cool BUT it doesn't appear to be in active development. The last news was from 2004 so I don't know what state the project is in. I was scared to install something that integrates into the Finder that might not be stable...

I have been playing around with iFolder for several days now and until recently it's been a frustrating experience. As I pointed out in my last post I was able to get the iFolder server up and running after a few snags and it seems to be working well...but the client has been a complete pain in the a$$.

My plan was to install the client on both my Windows box and my OS X ibook. At first it looked like it was working great. I created a folder on my windows box and put a few files in it and it synchronized with the server. Then I watched as my ibook synchronized and the folder and files were pulled down to it. GREAT! However a few more experiments fell flat. I decided to try and add some files to that folder on my ibook and see what happens. Nothing! Hmm. So I forced a manual sync operation and still nothing. I restarted the client and this time it picked up the changes and sync'd successfully but came up with a wierd status message "1 item out of sync". After that nothing would synchronize anymore. To make a long story short I tried everything I could but could not get the OS X client to consistently synchronize files. So I decided to see how well the latest development build of the iFolder client would work: 3.5. It was an even worse situation. The client would not connect to the server no matter what I did. Next I decided to give the 3.4 build a go.

Now we are talking! It seems to be working. Files are synchronizing as expected.

Here are the versions of iFolder software I am currently using:

ifolder3 server: 3.5.6112.1-1
ifolder3 client: 3.4.6112.1

Here are some of my test cases to check that iFolder is working...

Now that my Fedora install is upgraded to FC4 I decided to give iFolder a shot. It's actually "fairly" easy to install, but I ran into a couple of snags trying to get it configured and running.

Installation on Fedora is simplest if you use Yum. To do this you need to add repositories for mono and iFolder. Here is a super fast way to get the repositories setup:

For Mono:

wget http://www.go-mono.com/download/fedora-4-i386/mono.repo
cp mono.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

For iFolder:

wget http://forgeftp.novell.com/ifolder/server/3.5/iFolderServer-Fedora.repo
cp iFolderServer-Fedora.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

Now the repositories are setup, you should execute yum upgrade to update your repository lists.

To install now is a piece of cake:

yum install ifolder3-server

Yum rules! If you are familiar with Apt-Get you will appreciate Yum. It will download and install all the dependencies...no messing around with tar balls for me!

So now iFolder is installed but it needs to be configured. I read through this wiki page to get some details on configuring iFolder...