Hi there peeps,
I've spent the last few hours looking at how to best launch application
clients, and I couldn't find any documentation on how to do it nicely
(apart from Joe Ottingers's stuff on auto started application clients -
http://www.orionsupport.com/articles/appclient.html). I then discovered
I was doing it the hard way, and it occurred to me that others may also
be doing it this way, so here's what I discovered...
Previously I was doing something basic like this to launch my
application clients:
java -jar %ORION_HOME%\orion.jar;%ORION_HOME%\<many more orion
jars>;%ORION_HOME%/lib/log4j.jar;myapp-client.jar com.acme.MyAppClient
And I had a jndi.properties in the same directory which specified how to
connect to Orion.
This is clunky and requires that you distribute all your jar files to
the machine you wish to run it on. Yuck.
Then, I "discovered" applicationlauncher.jar (it's not exactly hidden,
it's in the Orion dir :-). This lets you launch application clients
locally, even if they are installed on remote systems. Its seemingly
like an Orion version of java web start.
To use it, you need to ensure that your application client is deployed
properly in a J2EE sense. For me, all I had to do was:
- add a <module> and <java> tags to my application.xml like so:
<module>
<java>myapp-client.jar</java>
</module>
- copy my shared libraries into a lib dir inside my .ear file
- add a manifest for myapp-client.jar with the main class and any shared
libraries like so:
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Main-Class: com.acme.MyAppClient
Class-Path: lib/log4j.jar
Now, I can launch the application client by issuing the command
java -jar c:\apps\orion\154\applicationlauncher.jar
ormi://localhost/myapp/mayapp-client.jar <user> <password>
This is cool because I don't have to frig about with the classpath or
jndi.properties at launch time, presumably I could launch it on a remote
machine if I wanted with similar ease (!). Presumably all you would need
on the remote machine would be applicationlauncher.jar and orion.jar
(rather than all your applications jar files), but I've not tested it...
Anyone have any comments on this?
Cheers
Geoff
