Installing FDS with JBoss and IIS

Here's the initial steps.

1. Download Jboss and run locally on my dev box. Install Flex Data Services. Unzip the FDS Admin, Flex and Samples files into folders of the same name with a .war extension, and drop these into the C:\Java\Jboss4\server\default\deploy folder - I find unzipping them first let's me work on the files more easily.


2. Configure mySql support. Drop a copy of the mysql-connector.jar in the C:\Java\Jboss4\server\default\lib folder. Create a datasource xml file called mysql-ds.xml in the C:\Java\Jboss4\server\default\deploy folder, looks like this:

   <datasources> 
      <local-tx-datasource> 
         <jndi-name>crm</jndi-name> 
         <connection-url>jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/crm</connection-url>
         <driver-class>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driver-class> 
         <user-name>user</user-name>
         <password>password</password>
      </local-tx-datasource> 
   </datasources>



3. Test the sample apps locally. This included Hibernate apps and all the sample apps. Also, a little flex app I wrote that uses remote calls and javamail to send email notifications.

Once I was confident that Jboss was running all the flex apps flawlessly, the next challenge was figuring out how to get jboss to run as a windows service. I downloaded the zip from this website, ensured that my JAVA_HOME and JBOSS_HOME system variables were set properly, namely without a trailing backslash, then ran "install default" from a command line. It successfully created a JBoss service, which worked great. I was now ready to move my stuff to my IIS Server.

I basically zipped up the jboss and javaservice folders and ftp'ed them up to the server. While it was uploading I installed the Java SDK, mySql, mySqltools and FDS on the server, in the same folders as on my local dev box. I setup my system variables JAVA_HOME and JBOSS_HOME, copied my data over to the mySQL data folder on the server. When the upload was done I unzipped my jboss and javaservice folders into my java folder, again keeping it exactly like my local install configuration. I ran jboss manually and tested all the sample apps. Then I installed it as a service, ran it and tested again.

The next test was hitting the sample applications from the web, outside my firewall. I could get the apps to launch however I was not getting any kind of connection... probably because my ISP blocks most ports by default (/sigh), including the default rtmp ports defined in the services-config.xml. So I went into the configuration files and added my-http to all the channels as the failover second channel. I restarted jboss just to be safe ( I find that hotdeployment on jboss seems to randomly end in out of memory errors!) and the apps did start working.

Now all the samples apps are setup by default to compile on the server - but my goal was to host the flex apps in IIS and not the app server. To test this, I had written another flex application that was set to compile locally in Flexbuilder. The advantage of this approach was that technically the swf files generated should be hostable on any webserver. On my local machine the app ran fine, but copying it up to the server gave me a channel connect error. The culprit here was the services-config.xml. By default the port used by any flex app is the same port the app is being served up on uri="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{/{context.root}/messagebroker/http". On my machine IIS is running on 80, and jboss is configured to listen on 8800. I hardcoded the config by replacing {server.port} with 8800, recompiled my app and then uploaded it to my IIS folder. And that did the trick!