Scott, that is a good idea to move towards BizComp types to interact with EC2 services - storage, SimpleDB, and Queueing. I'm guessing these are available through web services currently? It makes sense to verify what's available, and make sure it works with XAware. Longer term, I agree we'll want specific BizComp types to access those components.

I spent a couple hours today getting the XAware engine to run in EC2. It wasn't overly difficult. Here's an outline of what I did:

1. Signed up for EC2. Helpful resource: EC2 Video Tutorial (https://console.aws.amazon.com/)


2. Created an EC2 instance using Fedora, Tomcat, MySQL bundle in "Java Web Starter AMI" (http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/entry.jspa?externalID=1993&categoryID=101). Read this tutorial: http://ttlnews.blogspot.com/2009/01/setting-up-amazon-ami-with-java-and.html. I had 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 curl built in. So 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 and 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, which is working fine for me).


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:
   

   Code:

   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, <xaware.home>/publish 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 from Designer and invoke BizDocs

I'll try and get this written up in a Wiki soon. Obviously, this is just a sample basic installation, and I did not test any BizComps, only a BizDoc. But it does at least demonstrate the engine can run in EC2. Dennis, I think it also makes sense for us to prepare an AMI, as you originally suggested. This would avoid other users having to follow the steps above. I'm not sure at this point when we can get to that. Possibly sometime during the XAware 6 release cycle that is starting next month. This is something that can be done by anybody, so it doesn't need to be the core group here. We'd love to have a volunteer!