6/16/04 1:27 PMThe technology behind the site

Since this is the only FlowBuilder based blog that I know of, I thought I would describe the technology behind the site. Hopefully, this will create a frame of reference for people who aren't really sure what FlowBuilder is about yet.

Before I moved this blog to FlowBuilder, it was based on Domino. Going back even further, it was originally based on some PHP scripts. When I was getting ready to deploy the application, I didn't have any spare hardware to use. I remembered a DSAPI filter I had toyed with called the Tomcat Redirector from Andy Armstrong.

A little googling later, and I had the redirector in hand. I decided I would try to deploy flowbuilder on Tomcat on the same hardware as the Domino server, which also is acting as my Sametime testing server for the applications I develop in that space.

When I say hardware, I mean this is actually running in a virtual machine in my main server. When I say that I didn't have any spare hardware, I actually mean that I didn't have enough RAM to instantiate a new virtual machine on top of the three it already runs.

So, the foundation of this site is a Windows 2000 Server virtual machine running in VMWare. I just recently upgraded the Domino server to 6.5.1. I also have a separate Tomcat server installed. Its a Tomcat 4 server, but I don't know the specific release off hand. The final piece of basic technology is a FireBird 1.5 database server also running on the same machine.

I installed the Tomcat Redirector as a DSAPI filter on the Domino server, and I configured it so that any URL request with a context of "flowbuilder" gets forwarded on to Tomcat for response. To keep it all in the family, I am using Domino's LDAP capabilities to serve as the authentication resource in FB. This allows me to manage access to the FlowBuilder server from my NAB.

I then deployed a FlowBuilder 3.0 runtime and all of the applications as a WAR file on the Tomcat server. Besides the blog, I have a number of other applications deployed from the same WAR file. Mostly, these are applications that I am testing, or applications which may become public at some point in the future.

The only real downside is that I have everything deployed in the same flowbuilder context. This means that when I want to change any of the applications, I have to upload a complete WAR file. I have cheated a few times, and manually copied the files up to the server instead of reloading a WAR.

One option I would like to investigate in the future is the Brightline Application Server. I certainly haven't had any problems with the redirector, except that it fills up the application log on the server with messages, but this site does not receive the volume that a typical "production" site would see. I'm interested to know how well this combination would work as a small to medium volume solution.

4/1/09 6:22 AMre: The technology behind the site

4/6/09 4:34 PMre: The technology behind the site

4/22/09 9:18 PMre: The technology behind the site