alfresco with JBoss or Tomcat?

[seraphon]

Hi

I  downloaded alfresco v2.0 and i ve been discovering it for 2 days.
It seems to work perfectly and I was confident about using it for my project which to make it short is about managing photos.
But suddenly my boss speaks about alfresco being a good solution because it has JBoss. So here is my problem: v2.0 comes with only Tomcat.
Is there a difference between using alfresco with JBoss or tomcat?

Regards Seraphon

[kevinr]

Alfresco works with most app-servers, including TomCat, JBoss, BEAWeblogic, OracleAS and hopefully soon Webphere. The only difference is that you download a different bundle or you can deploy the WAR yourself if you already have the app server installed. So in your case, if you want to use JBoss instead, then you can download the basic WAR package and follow these instructions:
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Deploying_WAR_JBoss

Hope this helps,

Kevin

[seraphon]

What should I do if I want to change the app server and keep all the things I ve done until now?
What I mean, is that I ve installed alfresco first with tomcat and I ve linked it to a mysql database. I ve done some space, contents and rules.
But now I want to use JBoss instead of tomcat so is there a way to change tomcat into JBoss whithout having to reinstall everything? I really want to keep all the things I ve done.

regards
seraphon

[kevinr]

Yes there is. Alfresco stores it's data in two places - the MySQL DB and the alf_data directory. By default in TomCat you'll find the alf_data dir in the tomcat/bin directory. So it's a simple matter of setting up Alfresco with JBoss, then copying over the alf_data directory to jboss (to the jboss/bin dir). Then make sure your alfresco is pointing to the same db instance (it should be anyway) and it will work. I advise you back the DB and alf_data dir first of course.

Thanks,

Kevin

[seraphon]

I seem to encounter problems with making alfresco work with JBoss.

I followed the tutorial given in your link but when I have JBoss running with the usual message "started in ….."

When I go to http://localhost:8080/alfresco I have an almost blank page with:
HTTP Status 404 - /alfresco

type Status report

message /alfresco

description The requested resource (/alfresco) is not available.
Apache Tomcat/5.5.20



Could you please tell me what the problem is?
In my guess it seems that it doesnt find the alfresco data or folder.
The problem may come from the fact that I have a folder C:\alfresco
where I have all the necessary things to make alfresco run with tomcat and it does work. I ve created a folder C:\alfrescoJBoss where I ve put all the necessary files given in http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Deploying_WAR_JBoss
Do I have to put all the files for alfresco with JBoss in a folder named alfresco?

[seraphon]

oh and by the way my alf_data for tomcat is under the path
C:\Alfresco\alf_data.

and what is the use of the file probe.bat in the JBoss/bin

regards seraphon

[kevinr]

That's fine - as long as the new JBoss server is made to point to that alf_data then it's fine.

I have no idea what that file is for - it's a JBoss file not alfresco?

Thanks,

Kevin

[seraphon]

probe.bat is in JBoss bin and comes from the jboss-4.0.5GA.zip.
And I still have the problem of alfresco with JBoss not launching.
I am still getting this page I described 3 posts earlier. I m wondering now if it s not a problem of conflict with the alfresco using tomcat only. Of course when I launch alfresco with JBoss I ve shut down the one with tomCat but I wonder if the database alfresco is not still used or something.

But my big problem is that this is only speculation from me and I have no way to prove that.
I ll wait for a reply and if there is still this problem I ll try the violent way of deleting everything except my mysql database and alf_data then I reinstall alfresco with JBoss. That way if it still not work then at least I ll be sure its not because I have some conflict problem.

Regards seraphon


PS: Is there a way to cleanly leave the JBoss window? the file shutdown.bat doesnt seem to work and I have to close it by pushing the x button in the corner which gives me afterwards a warning message.

PS n°2: Now that I think about it I installed alfresco the first time with the setup and in that setup we could chose what kind of database we wanted to use. But when I install alfresco with JBoss manually where do I chose what kind of database I use? Is there any chance that a version of alfresco v2 setup with JBoss will come out soon?

[slickshow]

I am running into the same problem of trying to deploy Alfresco 2.0 on JBoss 4.2.GA. I had previously installed Alfresco 2.0 with Tomcat and HSQL and that seems to work fine. I am trying to get it work under JBoss 4.2.GA with its own HSQL database and running into deployment issues. This is what I did:

- Unzipped alfresco-community-war-2.0.0 into a folder C:\AlfrescoJBoss. This creates the alf_data and other folders underneath it
- Copied alf_start, alf_stop, alfreso batch files from the Tomcat installation into C:\AlfrescoJBoss folder and modifed so that it starts JBoss instead of Tomcat
- Copied alfresco.war to C:\jboss-4.2.0.GA\server\default\deploy folder
- Followed the rest of instructions for deploying Alfreso on JBoss from the WIKI page (including turning down the logs and deleting the log4j.jar file)
- Started JBoss, but failed to deploy with following errors:


'C:\jboss-4.2.0.GA\server\default\.\tmp\deploy\tmp42468alfresco-exp.war\' initialized.
2007-06-07 10:18:20,555 WARN  [org.jboss.web.jsf.integration.config.JBossJSFConfigureListener] MyFaces JSF implementation found!  This version of JBoss AS ships with the java.net implementation of JSF.  There are known issues when mixing JSF implementations.  This warning does not apply to MyFaces component libraries such as Tomahawk.  However, myfaces-impl.jar and myfaces-api.jar should not be used without disabling the built-in JSF implementation.  See the JBoss wiki for more details.
2007-06-07 10:18:28,837 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[jboss.web].[localhost].[/alfresco]] Exception sending context initialized event to listener instance of class org.jboss.web.jsf.integration.config.JBossJSFConfigureListener
javax.faces.FacesException: java.net.MalformedURLException: Path WEB-INF/faces-config-custom.xml does not start with a "/" character


Next error is about missing MySQL driver. However I needed it to work with HSQL just as it did with Tomcat, not sure where to configure this:

2007-06-07 10:19:15,875 INFO  [org.hibernate.connection.ConnectionProviderFactory] Initializing connection provider: org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalDataSourceConnectionProvider
2007-06-07 10:19:15,905 WARN  [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] SQL Error: 0, SQLState: null
2007-06-07 10:19:15,905 ERROR [org.hibernate.util.JDBCExceptionReporter] Cannot load JDBC driver class 'org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver'
2007-06-07 10:19:15,905 WARN  [org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory] Could not obtain connection metadata
org.apache.commons.dbcp.SQLNestedException: Cannot load JDBC driver class 'org.gjt.mm.mysql.Driver'
   at org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource.createDataSource(BasicDataSource.java:766)
   at org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource.getConnection(BasicDataSource.java:540)
   at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalDataSourceConnectionProvider.getConnection(LocalDataSourceConnectionProvider.java:80)
   at org.hibernate.cfg.SettingsFactory.buildSettings(SettingsFactory.java:72)
   at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSettings(Configuration.java:1881)
   at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1174)
   at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.newSessionFactory(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:800)
   at org.springframework.orm.hibernate3.LocalSessionFactoryBean.afterPropertiesSet(LocalSessionFactoryBean.java:726)
   at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.invokeInitMethods(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1059)
   at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:363)
   at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:226)
   at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:147)
   at ….


Could someone provide detailed instructions on how they successfully deployed Alfresco 2.0 on JBoss 4.2.GA using HSQL database. Also not sure if Alfresco is planning a 2.0 release with the JBoss bundle.

Thanks.

[seraphon]

I d like to add that in the wiki page explaining how to make JBoss work with alfresco v2 there is no mention of unzipping the alfresco community v2.zip, just that we need the file alfresco.war inside it. There is also no mention of the JDK v5 that I had to install for Tomcat but I may have misunderstood or missed it somewhere.


  And thanks for your posts until now kevinr and I hope you ll continue to help us understand more alfresco.