How to configure Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) to run XAware

The XAware engine can be installed and run in a cloud computing environment. This architecture lets you avoid local infrastructure investments, and is most beneficial when you need to integrate data sources and applications involving other cloud-based or SaaS resources (not all resources are premise-based). If you are using SaaS or other internet-based resources, placing an integration component like XAware on the internet makes sense. It makes less sense if all your application components are premise-based, depending on performance requirements. This latter scenario would have multiple premise-based components contributing data to the cloud, where the data is combined and transformed, then sent back into premise-based resources. Only a few types of integration applications can afford such a round-trip to/from the cloud.

One of the most popular cloud-based infrastructure products available is Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) environment. This environment lets you pay for hardware and software resources as you go, with a large number of operating system and other software options. Many options are completely open source-based, and EC2 infrastructure is reasonably priced as well. The combination is very cost-effective and flexible for many integration applications.

Setting up the XAware engine to run in EC2 is fairly straightforward. The following outlines the steps needed to do this. It includes pointers to introductory tutorials on EC2, so those new to that environment should be able to get XAware running in that environment.

  1. Sign up for EC2. Helpful resource: EC2 Video Tutorial ([1])

  2. Create an EC2 instance using Fedora, Tomcat, MySQL bundle in "Java Web Starter AMI" ([2]). Read this tutorial: [3]. You might need to separately open up HTTP access using the Security Groups setting from the main EC2 Dashboard.

  3. Log into the cloud instance using putty (see first tutorial)

  4. This AMI has the 'curl' HTTP command line invoker built in. You can use it to download XAware's Unix/Linux off-line installer, using a command like this: 

> curl http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/xaware/XAware_unix_5_4_0_223.tar.gz > XAware_unix_5_4_0_223.tar.gz. gunzip

Untar, then run the installer from the command line. You'll need to tell it to download a JRE, but we won't use that one (we'll use the already installed JRE 1.7).

  5. Provide xaware.home to Tomcat, by added this line to /usr/share/tomcat5/conf/tomcat5.conf, just before the current setting of JAVA_OPTS:

     JAVA_OPTS="-Dxaware.home=/usr/local/XAware_5.4.0.223" 

Update your setting according to your actual installation directory. Restart Tomcat using the command "/etc/init.d/tomcat5 restart".

  6. Deploy xaware.war to Tomcat. I used the Tomcat Manager console accessed from this URL: http://<your_public_EC2_DNS>/

  7. To publish from Designer which is running on your local workstation, <xaware.home>/publish on the server needs 'write' permissions for the user running Tomcat. For now, I just did a chmod 777 of that directory.

  8. You can verify that xaware.war is up and running by hitting the EchoServlet: http://<your_public_EC2_DNS>/xaware/EchoServlet?test=me

  9. You should now be able to deploy a XAR file from Designer and invoke BizDocs

Some users have reported problems deploying and running BizDocs in step 9. It appears that j2ee.jar is not accessible in some installations. You should ensure that j2ee.jar is present in <tomcat-home>/lib. You can copy the file from <xaware.home>/client if you've installed the client libraries, or from an XAware installation for Tomcat or JBoss in their respective lib directories.

At this point, you have a sample basic installation. But it does at least demonstrate the engine running in EC2. Once your server is up and running, you will be charged by Amazon. If you are just experimenting, you can simply delete the server instance when you are done to avoid further, ongoing charges.