A while ago I introduced you to my Google Summer of Code 2010 project, the WAR Products. I really appreciate your participation with feedback and bugs. It showed me that there is a real need for this tooling, so I’m proud to announce that the WAR Products development will not continue in the RAP Project.

You may think, “WTF? Odd thing to be proud of.” But, it really does make sense . The WAR Products were never targeted to be part of RAP, primarily because the tooling is not RAP specific. It eases the deployment of Server-Side Equinox applications. And this kind of application does not necessarily have to be a RAP application.

Three months ago a new Eclipse project was announced. It’s called Libra or formerly “OSGi Enterprise Tools” (it had to be renamed ‘Libra’ because of legal issues). I don’t want to repeat the project goal here because Kaloyan (the Libra project lead) does a much better job with this than I could. You can read about the project in this proposal. Libra passed the project creation review a while ago and provisioning by the eclipse.org webmasters is ongoing. So, why am I talking about Libra here?

There is a simple reason.  Because of one sentence from Kaloyan about Libra, I thought it would be the perfect project to contribute the WAR Products to.  “Libra tries to close the gap between PDE and WTP”.  This maps exactly to the WAR Products as the tooling tries to ease the deployment of Equinox-based applications on Servlet-Containers or JavaEE Application Servers.

Additionally there are plans to extend the tooling with a WTP integration to enhance the creation of a WAR Archive with automated deployment functionality, without adding explicit dependencies to WTP. And where can this development be done better than in between PDE and WTP?

Yesterday I committed the WAR Products to the Libra git repository after it passed the IP process successfully. I also set up a temporary p2 repository from which you can install the tooling (Eclipse 3.7 M4+ required). Of course we’re trying to push Libra in the direction of Indigo. If this works you will soon be able to install the WAR Products from the Indigo Repository. Please keep in mind that the bundle ID’s have changed during the move. So, if you had installed the sneak-preview from this blog post, please uninstall the tooling before installing the Libra version. It’s really worth getting the new version because of many bug fixes and enhancements which are included. Please feel free to file bugs, but this time against Libra

Please note: To use the WAR Product’s full functionality you need to add the Equinox Server-Side SDK to your target or set RAP 1.4 M5 as your target environment. There is no longer a “requiredBundles.zip” that you need. Use this temporary p2 repository to install the WAR Products: http://download.eclipsesource.com/~hstaudacher/warproducts/3.7/

Tags: equinox, gsoc, indigo, libra, pde, rap, server-side, wtp

Yesterday Amazon launched a new service called AWS Elastic Beanstalk. It’s basically a Tomcat hosting service. You can upload your WAR files via a web interface, to an instance of a Linux cloud image pre-configured with Tomcat. This is from the official Amazon description:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is an even easier way for you to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud. You simply upload your application, and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring. At the same time, with Elastic Beanstalk, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time. Elastic Beanstalk leverages AWS services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto-Scaling to deliver the same highly reliable, scalable, and cost-effective infrastructure that hundreds of thousands of businesses depend on today. AWS Elastic Beanstalk is easy to begin and impossible to outgrow.

So, as an Eclipse guy the first question that comes to mind is, “Does OSGi/Equinox run on this?” I mean, it definitely should because we have the great Server-Side Equinox technology which we can deploy in a WAR file. So, I did a little experiment which everyone can repeat on his own. It took only 5 minutes to confirm that Equinox can run on Amazon’s Beanstalk. Here are the steps:

1. Create a Server-Side Equinox Application and package it into a WAR file. If you want to use an existing file I recommend that you download the rapdemo.war from the RAP Examples Demo. RAP Applications are basically Server-Side Equinox Applications with a UI.
2. Create an AWS Account and activate AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Follow the steps described in the AWS Management console.
3. Use the Web Interface to upload your example war archive. Don’t forget to check “Launch a new environment running this Application”.
4. After the upload is successful you have to wait a few minutes until the instance is started. When this is finished your application will be online and reachable under name-of-your-application.beanstalk.com. The example I deployed can be reached using this URL: http://eclipserap.elasticbeanstalk.com/

It was highly likely that Equinox was going to work on the beanstalk. But to be certain it works, is even better.  I can also say that I was really impressed by how easy it is to get a WAR file running on the beanstalk.  Just  two years ago, the only option you had to deploy a WAR file was to rent a (V)Server and set up Tomcat on your own. The question for me  now is how long it will take until the deployment of OSGi bundles will be so easy. Oh wait, there is Eclipse RTP…

Tags: amazon, beanstalk, eclipse, equinox, rap, rtp, server-side, tomcat