As I posted earlier I'm getting to deploy and test Alfresco and Pentaho on lots of app servers. Today I've been fighting with Geronimo and Alfresco. There are a couple of issues that need to be worked to make Geronimo happy.

• First: Unlike Tomcat, Geronimo validates the deployment descriptor against the schema so the <description> element must be first in several elements that it is not. I filed the problem under Alfresco Bug #34. I have also attached a substitute web.xml in case you want to try this at home.
• Second: You have to specify that some of the classes in the alfresco.war/WEB-INF/lib jars must be blocked from other class loaders like this;

    <hidden-classes><filter>org.springframework</filter></hidden-classes>
    <hidden-classes><filter>antlr</filter></hidden-classes>
    <context-root>/alfresco</context-root>
    <context-priority-classloader>false</context-priority-classloader>

• Third: You have to specify a dependency on the mysql jdbc driver also in the geronimo-web.xml, like this;

    <dependency>
      <groupId>mysql</groupId>
      <type>jar</type>
      <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
      <version>5.0.0-beta-bin</version>
    </dependency>

• This looks a lot like a maven dependency you might be thinking, and you'd be right but the <type> element is in a different place, and yes that was another forehead brusing experiment in irritation. I posted the geronimo-web.xml file here.
• Finally: Alfresco requires JSE 5.0 (so its not really supported on Geronimo but I love pain) so you have to disable the stuff in Geronimo that requires J2SE 1.4, namely you have to undeploy the DayTrader app and turn off anything in Console->System Module related to corba (i.e. geronimo/client-corba/1.1-SNAPSHOT/car).

Cayenne 1.2 has gone beta. Check out the full announcement here. I am really excited to see the community grow as it moves over to apache. If you are interested in an ASL alternative for your relational-object mapping stuff go check it out.

Got a call from the shippers, the box arrives today - going to be hard to get any work done :-)

When it was first announced I thought 'hmmm cool but not relevant for me...'. Then I got a really cool gig to run Pentaho BI and Alfresco on various app servers open source and not (in particular - JBoss, JOnAS, WebSphere, WebLogic, GlassFish and Geronimo).

Well that is no simple task to be sure but I figured while I'm at it I might as well try to score a free server from Sun. So I ordered one of the T2000 servers. I will be configuring it and deploying all these app servers to the T2000 in the next few days (as soon as it gets here). I'll let you know how getting Pentaho and Alfresco running on each of them goes. I'll also be running some performance #'s on each server and each hardware platform. Look for me to be performance drama man for the next several weeks :-).

In addition to the Sun hardware I will also be hitting Unisys (hoping I don't have any problems with that one:), Dell and IBM machines.

I also created a new category to track these posts. Feel free to subscribe if you are interested in the drama :-)