This page lists the things you may want to consider when installing SIRA_PRISE. It's a bit of a mish-mash in that some sections will apply only to a manual install procedure, and some to the GUI install procedure, or some will only apply to a Linux install, or only to a Windows install. At any rate, it's probably worthwhile going through these remarks, if only cursorily, before engaging with the install.

Prerequisites

A Java™ VM, version 1.7.0 or later, must be accessible on the machine where any of the SIRA_PRISE components are to be installed/run.

In order to be able to install and use the SIRA_PRISE web client, a Web application server (e.g. Tomcat, Jetty, JBOSS, WebSphere, GlassFish, ...), must additionally be installed, operational and accessible on the machine where the webclient is to run.

Contents of the zip file [Manual installation]

Installing the software components [Manual installation]

1. Extract the contents of the zip file to a directory of your choice (e.g. C:\SIRA_PRISE or /usr/share/SIRA_PRISE). The various SIRA_PRISE components will be in subdirectories of your chosen installation directory. Note that with recent versions of Windows, it might not be the best of ideas to try and do this in the %PROGRAMFILES% folder, if only for the special protection measures this folder "enjoys".
2. Depending on your OS, remove the files named sp.*.bat or sp.*.sh, and on Linux, make the shell scripts executable using chmod (sorry, no tar.gz yet). Note that the Linux shell scripts are provided as-is (sorry once again, if you're on Linux you'll know better than I how to get those right).
3. Then from the 'server' subdirectory of your SIRA_PRISE installation directory, run one of the two provided sp.sysgen_xx procedures and answer all questions asked to the best of your ability. The sp.sysgen_CP version is a command-prompt installation procedure, usable on headless machines. The sp.sysgen.SwingUI version is the one with the Swing-based GUI procedure. Either will do, but you will most likely prefer the GUI version.

"All questions asked" mainly concern quantity estimates allowing the installation procedure to determine the needed initial physical size of the catalog. The GUI version has the following defaults, which should suffice to get you going :

This gives a catalog of roughly 70M initial size.

The installation procedure will end with the message : "System Generation completed successfully.". A file named DATABASECATALOG.SPDB has appeared in the DATABASES subdirectory of your chosen SIRA_PRISE data directory. You are now ready to start the server.

(If something goes wrong, a SYSTEM.ERR file and a SERVERENGINE.LOG file will have been created in the LOGS subdirectory of your chosen SIRA_PRISE data directory, both containing more info about the precise nature of the problem. But we do hope you’ll get to see none of that.)

Overview of tasks & corresponding needed installation components

OS user considerations [Manual & GUI installations]

The installation process is best performed while logged on as a user with administrative rights on the machine. On Linux, you probably logged on as root to perform this step. However, you may want to run the SIRA_PRISE engine as a separate user that has no rights on any folders except the SIRA_PRISE binaries and data folders. Nothing is provided in any install procedure to help you with this, so you're on your own, but for the following very brief tips :

• With the manual install procedure, you may want to consider creating the OS user first, install the binaries with root authorities (or Windows equivalent), and running the sysgen procedure while logged on as the "dedicated" new SIRA_PRISE user.
• With the GUI install procedure, the sysgen procedure is run as part of the install and no means is provided to skip this. So the SIRA_PRISE data directories are now owned by the user that performed the installation (root), and you may want to change ownership & access rights of those data directories. You'll need to do this manually.

Configuring the server [Manual & GUI installations]

After the sysgen procedure has been run, a default configuration file 'be.SIRAPRISE.server.ServerEngine.properties' has been placed in the install directory. While this default configuration can obviously suffice to get you going, you might later want to revisit this file in order to tune the system. The reference for the contents of the configuration file can be found in the javadoc.

Starting the SIRA_PRISE server at boot time [Linux]

An basic init.d script is included in the installation, that can be fed to update-rc.d (Debian/Ubuntu) for including the SIRA_PRISE server in your local machine startup process. Customize as appropriate, and enjoy.

Deploying the web client [Manual & GUI installations]

Right after installation, the .WAR files holding the various included web apps are in the install directory. That's of course not where your application server is going to be looking for them. You still need to deploy the .WAR files to your application server(s).

Most modern web application servers have an autodeploy feature which makes it very easy to install a new web application. Usually, the only thing that needs be done is to copy the WAR file containing the application to the autodeploy directory of the web application server. E.g. on a GlassFish server installed on Windows, this is a directory typically called "C:\Program Files\Sun\AppServer\domains\domain1\autodeploy". With a Tomcat server, this is simply the 'webapps' directory in the Tomcat installation. For more details or for your particular application server, please consult the documentation that came with your web application server on how to use its autodeploy feature.

For installing the web client, the only step needed is thus to follow your application server's autodeploy procedure using the SIRA_PRISE.war file included in the package.

Deploying the birdwatcher demo application

Installing the birdwatcher demo application involves two steps : installing the birdwatcher webclient and setting up the database.

Installing the birdwatcher web client is done using exactly the same procedure as when installing the database administration web client, only this time you should place the birdwatcher.war file in the autodeploy directory of your web application server.

Setting up the database is done by running the scripts that are included in the birdwatcher.zip file. This requires that the server is running, and the java client libraries have been installed. For more information on running scripts, please see the page on that subject.

Using the java client

The java client is a library that you can use in your java programs to make those programs interact with a SIRA_PRISE server. Place a copy of the sp.client.jar file in the library path of your application, just as you would include any other library in them.

Using the standalone database browser

The standalone database browser is a self-contained, Swing-based, GUI interface to a SIRA_PRISE server. The provided sp.dbrowser.bat (.sh) scripts will fire it up.