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This article provide details about the Apache Geronimo installation. Here you will find information about what are pre requisite software, where to download Geronimo from and how to customize the installation to use custom ports other than the defaults.
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This article is organized in the following sections:
- #Prerequisite software
- #Downloading Geronimo
- #Changing the default ports
- #Changing the default user name and password
- #Topologies
- #Summary
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Prerequiste software
Apache Geronimo v1.2 builds on J2SE 1.5 using Maven 2, get the appropriate versions from the following sites.
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Detailed steps and requirements are covered in deep in Building Apache Geronimo with Maven 2
Installing Geronimo from binaries
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There are several reasons for changing the network ports, namely to run multiple instances of Geronimo. To configure the default port edit the <geronimo_home>/var/config/config.xml file. The out-of-the-box config.xml for Apache Geronimo v1.2 with Tomcat distribution is shown in the following example.
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Here are two excerpts from the config.xml file, one for Tomcat and one for Jetty. These excerpts show the entire section where the listeners are defined, we have just replaced the standard 8080 with an arbitrary port, 9000 in this case.
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Save the file and restart the server, with the new configuration loaded point your web browser to the new port.
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Open the <geronimo_home>/var/security/groups.properties file and edit the contents of this file. Add any username that you require and save the file.
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Next, open the <geronimo_home>/var/security/users.properties file. You can change the password for the existing system account or add new users. When adding new users, the username has to be the same as the ones added to the groups.properties file.
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In this example, two users have been added, user1 and user2 and the default system account has been deleted. Both user1 and user2 can access the console and the command line deployment tools.
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The Apache Web server is the best, and most popular, HTTP server software in use on the Internet today. In your production enviroment using Geronimo with the Apache Web server would give you some rigorous advantages as given below.
- Clustering & Load Balancing
Clustering allows an application server to support multiple nodes with failover, session data sharing, and load balancing across many network nodes. Load balancing of the application can be done with the help of inbuilt support of Apache server.
- SSL Encoder
The advantages of Web server proxies are that they offer a way to get server affinity for SSL-encrypted messages, without any extra hardware. But extensive SSL processing puts an extra load on the proxy. It will be handled by Apache server while Geronimo can handle business logic of the application.
- Application Load Sharing
In many serving systems, web and application servers work together to handle all HTTP requests. Apache handles the request for static pages (including HTML, JPEG, and GIF files), while Geronimo handles requests for dynamic pages (JSPs or servlets) with the help of Tomcat/Jetty. Geronimo servers can also handle static pages, but in combined systems, they are usually configured to handle dynamic requests.
Summary
Using the Geronimo application server lets you build a secure enterprise infrastructure conforming to the latest standards and requirements. This article gave you an insight into custom configuration of the standard Geronimo installation, with several installation methods.