7/21/04 2:20 PMInstalling FlowBuilder 3.0 on Linux (SuSE 9.1)

In this article I'm going to step through the process to get FlowBuilder up and running on Linux. For this article, I'm going to be installing on SuSE 9.1. These instructions should apply to most Linux distributions. The key issue you might run into is the location of the Java runtime, which I will dig into further in the article.

Please note that this article is specific to FlowBuilder 3.0. The instruction here may not apply to 2.0 or even releases after 3.0. I will attempt to update the article as needed to address issues with future releases of FlowBuilder.

Installing Firebird

We will begin by installing our Firebird database. You will want to download the latest edition of Firebird from SourceForge. These instructions will be based on Firebird 1.5, the specific build I am using is 1.5.0.4290. I will be using the RPM file for installing. I will also be installing the super server edition not the classic edition.

After downloading the RPM, open a console and su to root. Root access is required to perform the RPM installation. When root access has been obtained, execute the following command:

rpm -ivh FirebirdSS-1.5.0-xxxx.i686.rpm

Replace the "xxxx" with the appropriate build number.

Once the RPM install has been completed, there are a couple of tasks left to do. We need to change the sysdba password, which was set to a random value and we need to create the database we will be using

to change the sysdba password, edit the following file. Detailed instructions are provided in the file, so I won't cover them here. However, I did want to note that the directions in tha password file indicate that you should update the password in "/etc/rc.d/init.d/firebird". However, that file is actually "/etc/init.d/firebird" in SuSE 9.1.

/opt/firebird/SYSDBA.password

With the password changed we can complete the firebird installation by creating the database which will be used by FlowBuilder. You can put the database wherever you like; I'm going to create a new directory called "/home/firebird" and then create a database called "fbapp.fdb".

While logged in a root on the console, execute the following set of commands to prepare the directory:

cd /home
mkdir firebird
chown firebird:firebird /home/firebird

Firebird provides a script which can be run to create the database. As root or firebird execute the following commands:

cd /opt/firebird/bin
./createAliasDB.sh fbapp.fdb /home/firebird/fbapp.fdb

If you are reading the release notes from the Firebird team, they actually have a typo and call the script createDBAlias. (At least in the version I have)

One last thing I would do is to restart the firebird service after making these changes. It may not be neccesary, but I like to make sure everything works as expected. You can restart Firebird using a root console with the following command: (Remember this is for SuSE 9.1)

/etc/init.d/firebird restart

Installing FlowBuilder 3.0

Now that Firebird is ready to do, FlowBuilder can be installed. You may have downloaded FlowBuilder from Trilog as a .exe file. This file is actually a jar file that can be executed from Java on on a console. To start the installation, simply execute the following commands from a console:

mv fbins30xxxx.exe fbins30xxxx.jar
java -jar fbins30xxxx.jar

To execute these commands, replace the 'xxxx' in the filename with the appropriate build number. Once the installer starts, you can follow the screens as if you were installing on a Windows client. If you simply accept all of the defaults you will be fine because we will fine tune the installation once its ready.

Post Installation Configuration

Once the setup has finished copying files, you are almost ready to start developing. In SuSE 9.1 we need to update the FlowBuilder scripts a little bit since the defaults will not work.

Switch to the following directory, which is the location of the unix scripts that we will be using:

/home/<username>/FlowBuilder30/bin/unix

Edit the clients.sh script and update the JAVA variable to look like this:

JAVA=$JAVA_HOME/jre/bin/java

This is a minor update to the existing JAVA variable, which looks like $JAVA_HOME/bin/java

You will also need to make the same update to the "server.sh" and "Tomcat.sh" scripts.

At this point, you should be able to start the Visual XSP Studio by executing the following command from the flowbuilder/bin/unix directory discussed above:

./VisualXSPStudio.sh

Once the studio has launched, a couple of updates need to be made to prepare our working environment. We will set up the studio to launch Konqueror to preview pages and we need to update resources.xml to point at the database we created earlier. Then we can run the default deployment to get the basic setup deployed.

To set Konquerer as the browser, choose Window->Options from the studio menu, and then change to the "Applications" tab in the panel. In the field for "Web Browser", enter the following path to Konqueror: (If you are not using SuSE 9.1 its location may vary slightly)

/opt/kde3/bin/konqueror

To use our local Firebird database, open resources.xml from the WEB-INF directory. If you set up the database in the same way that I did, change the JDBC Url to jdbc:firebirdsql://127.0.0.1//home/firebird/fbapp.fdb. See the screen shot below to see how your resource should look.

Finally, we are ready to deploy and test the setup. To test Tomcat select it from the Tools menu (Tomcat Server...). It will simply open a console window from the Tomcat.sh script we updated earlier. Once Tomcat has started, we can go ahead and deploy and test the environment. Launch the DefaultDeployment.deployment file from the root of the XSP studio file directory and proceed with deployment. Then select the index.html file from the same directory and push the Execute/Preview button or press F5.

From this point, you should be able to use FlowBuilder in Linux much like you would from Windows. Hopefully this guide helped you get started.