I have been working with WCM & ECM for over 7 years. Designing and developing solutions for my customers. I have worked with customer of all sizes from large corporate and fortune 100 companies, to Federal Agencies, and smaller companies. This blog will be dedicated to helping others in the CMS industry find solutions that are sometimes outside the box. Having worked for a large ECM vendor for several years it has been nice to not be as restricted in the solutions that I provide.

About Me

Monday, April 2, 2007

My Junk Linux Box or A little Fun

I could not decide on a title for this entry... so I apologize. What I would like to mention is why the difficulty with deciding on the title.

The First Title: I have a Junk Linux Box... that said with the warmest endearment of the word junk, in other words it's a spare box that I beat the heck out of, and do rely on a lot, but all in all it's a junker. It is setup on an old pc with as much ram as it can handle, and I rebuild it about once ever 4 or 5 months. So this box does exactly what I need it to do and I do care for it a lot, but all in all if it dies I'll simply replace whatever fries on it and bring it back to life, but this article is not about my development environment. It is more about:

The Second Title: I wanted to have a little fun this weekend, and while checking out another CMS product called OpenCMS (part of another project) I decided to see if I could have a little fun.

Can Alfresco WCM & OpenCMS Live Together in Alfresco's Tomcat Instance

Taking the life of my "Junk Linux Box" in hand I started reading more and more about Alfresco and OpenCMS's requirements and architecture. I could not see anything that said "DO NOT DO THIS!" "DUMB IDEA" so I continued on.

Before I forget I should also mention that this box is running CentOS, and has MySql, Apache, MediaWiki, and Alfresco 2.0 on it already.

Following the OpenCMS (instructions) I saw that for the most part having Alfresco WCM gave me most of what I needed: Java, Tomcat, and MySql.

So I kept going... still no signs of warnings saying "Dave stop now!".

For those of you who've never installed OpenCMS it is a very straightforward install. You simply deploy the opencms.war file into your Tomcat Instance. Tomcat then expands the war file (unless configured not to) when it is started.

I then started up Alfresco, and checked out the tomcat logs and also the webapps directory and sure enough Alfresco's tomcat instance was expanding the war file nicely. There we still no notes in the logs saying "Stop now" so I moved onto the next step.

After tomcat finished starting I went to the browser and typed in: http://localhost:8080/opencms/setup/ and sure enough the OpenCMS Setup-Wizard was waiting to go.

I checked the logs and Alfresco 2.0 with WCM was not complaining. So I went through the wizard, and after setting up the DataBase I was able to get OpenCMS and Alfresco 2.0 with WCM running together with out any apparent issues.

So while having a little fun I have proved to myself that Alfresco and OpenCMS can run on Alfresco's Tomcat instance. I am going to keep working with this and as I go forward if I see any OpenCMS or Alfresco Issues I will let everyone know, but so far it looks good.