Jembi TS Web Browser Installation

Jembi TS Web Browser Installation

Jembi has developed a TS web browser as a replacement for the standard Apelon DTS tree browser for use as part of RHEA. The following is an installation guide for it using Ubuntu.

The website itself is written in PHP using the Twitter Bootstrap Framework and runs in Apache. It interfaces to a Tomcat server which in turn interfaces to Apelon DTS via its Java APIs. The interface between Apache and Tomcat is accomplished using PHP/Java Bridge.

  • Install both Apache and Tomcat

    sudo apt-get install apache2 tomcat7
    
  • Install PHP
    • sudo apt-get install php5 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-cgi
    • Edit the file /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini, setting On to the option allow_url_include:

      allow_url_include = On
      

      This is necessary in order to use the PHP/Java bridge in PHP.

  • Setup the website
    • The website code is available on github at https://github.com/jembi/ts-browser
    • Copy the Web code to /var/www/, e.g.

      sudo cp -R Web /var/www/
      
    • Create a directory called export and make sure that the user tomcat7 has read/write access to it, i.e.

      sudo chown tomcat7:tomcat7 export
      

      This folder will be used by the API layer to cache csv exports in.

  • The Jembi TS API code is available at https://github.com/jembi/ts-browser
    • Check out the code and compile the API project using Ant. It is an Eclipse project.
    • Copy the compiled jar to /usr/share/tomcat7/lib to make it available to the PHP/Java bridge
    • Copy the jars in the directories lib and lib-common of the API source to /usr/share/tomcat7/lib, EXCEPT for the jar servlet-api.jar (it will conflict with the existing one in the directory).
  • Restart both Apache and Tomcat

    sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
    sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat7 restart
    

The TS website should now be running.

Note that when you startup the server for the first time, the csv exports will not have been generated yet. This will however be done automatically, but may take a while.

A note on security: The website only needs to be accessed externally by clients through Apache (port 80). So it is not necessary to open ports for Apelon DTS or Tomcat on the server.