Land of confusion

Posted by Daniel Lindgren on June 27, 2010, 6:30 PM EDT

I delve deeper into the Noob View of what should be a straightforward installation of a webapp.

If, by any chance, you are, or have been, in the place I am right now, I suspect you'll recognice my problem. I am completely without coding experience whatsoever(Well, i managed to do a skin for a forum some time ago, I have even been able to do a SQL query(albeit by a step-by-step tutor) and I have been able to insert a Java frame in a Joomla pane). I have stuck with Mr Gates since my first 386 and windows 3.11. Since then I've tried XAMPP, setting up a forum for my game clan(All hail SRW, the Scandinavian Radical Warriors, quite a force of destruction in the old days of BF2 and similar FPS) but as soon as I get stuck on a problem, "Google is your friend". Well sometimes Mr Google can be TOO friendly, serving up just too many asnwers to the same problem, each answer contradicting another. Sometimes the answers are old, but resemble the problem at hand, but are, in fact, still not the right one...maybe I should take some classes in Googling...Is there a doctors degree in that? Hey I have a "B.Goo, Bachelor of Googe" You know what I mean. 

Now, i'm in a position where i've let my mouth do some sirious talking, wihtout the necesary facts at hand, and i've promised my company(i'm a mere assembly line worker) that things will change radically IF i'm let loose on some wiki project. In the last few months i've walked throught at least 10 wiki's, with mixed results, but always with atleast one drawback stopping me from sticking with it. The most promising one was TikiWiki, drawback: flaky WYSIWYG editor. i cannot leave my peers in the land of markup, It HAS to be WYSIWYG at its best, or else i'll loose at least half the audience at "Hello". The next best was Xwiki, drawback: In my eyes it takes too long to make it into the kind of straghtforward wiki i'm looking for, and the taxonomy(what kind of a word is that anyway?)is far from my ideal.

Anyway, it was through Xwiki i came in contact with Tomcat. It was a struggle to setup, and evidently I missed half the lessons I should've learned. I believe that I've come to the right conclusion, that Tomcat can work as a daemon(booh!?!), which means that the sole purpose of the can it resides is is the to serve as a Tomcat server. it can also be run as a User Instance, in which case the server can be let loose at other stuff too, while serving multiple "User Instances" of Tomcat, completely separate from each other. Had I done the User instance from the start, and also (Don't shoot me i'm wrong here) NOT tried to paste one kind of Java on top of the one bundled with Ubuntu, as recommened in the CRM installation instrucions(I never even bothered the find out what "bcc-java" was) I believe that this Java gotcha i'm up against right now, might never have happened. I'll have to figure out whether the comment about inferiour Java distro's holds true to the OpenJava bundled with Ubuntu 10.04.

It's quite natural that no software supplier, especially a OpenSource can provide step-by-step instructions for EVERY server setup out there, there's just to many flavors, Windows in different shapes, Linux in even more shapes, and network surroundings shift even more, from a single windows box serving as someones home project to a full virtualized Farm.

In this episode, i'll try to rectify a possible Java "circular dependencies" problem I created for myself, or atleast try to work around it, and hopefully actually deploy ConcourseConnect(Mind you, that i've managed to deploy CRM, but the fact that I used the same name for the deployment of Connect as I did before going User Instance, is bludgeoning the poor Tomcat on the head as soon as I try to deploy again, with the new instance, rendering the little kitten unconscious)

Back in a jiffy