ZK / Tomcat Hosting at EATJ

Last night, I attempted to upload my ZK app at GoDaddys's shared hosting servers. I've planned to do this for a long time already but I just kept on postponing a possibly dreadful experience. I don't like the idea of waiting 24 hours between restarts of its Tomcat service.

So, how long is 24 hours? It's long enough to compel me to look for another webhosting service. In an hour or so, I was already up and running at EATJ web hosting solutions.

EATJ offers a free account for first-time users. For free accounts, the Tomcat JVM is shut down 4 times daily in order to save on server resources. Your Tomcat server, however, can be restarted easily within 30 secs via your control panel. The paid plans enjoy 24x7 monitoring for continuous server uptime.

I registered for a free account and got my control panel in just a couple of minutes. This guide will help you get started and ready to deploy your own app. I created my own zk307.war file containing the ZK 3.0.7 jars as well as my ZK app and dependencies by executing the command jar cvf ..\zk307.war * in the zk307 directory.

The war file is rather chunky at 21mb (the free account allows for 50mb) and uploading it seemed to be the most challenging chore of all. I had to retry once for the two uploads I did. Here's the listing of the webapps directory contents in the remote server.


Restart the Tomcat server and taadaaaa... my ZK app remotely-hosted at http://rexjun.s43.eatj.com/zk307/k3soap.zul!

If you happen to catch my Tomcat service down, don't wait for me to restart it.. instead, create your own in under an hour!

ZK Version 3.0.7 released

The ZK front-end app to KnowledgeTree was developed using version 3.0.6. The newer version 3.0.7 was released on August 1 and I had the chance to install ZK from scratch and run the ZK front-end app successfully.

Here are the steps:

• download zk-bin-3.0.7.zip from sourceforge.net
• copy the MyApp directory (from the demo package) under the webapps directory of Apache Tomcat. Rename it to accordingly (I used zk307 in this example).
• Create the WEB-INF/lib sub-directory. Place here all the jars found under the dist/lib directory of the zk-bin-3.0.7 package. Copy the jars under the ext and zkforge directories also but omit the directories - place all jars under WEB-INF/lib
• Add the ktws.jar and the jars required by Apache Axis (see previous blog entry)

Fire up Tomcat and point your browser to http://localhost:8080/zk307/ktlogin.zul

There are over 9 new features and 22 bug fixes under this new release. Read more about the new ZK release here.

ZK + SOAP + KnowledgeTree

Here's a working ZK app that performs a SOAP login to KnowledgeTree's web services.



I've uploaded the source code to a KnowledgeTree repository and can be downloaded using the KT-Gadget.

You need to download the following files:

• ZK front-end app (ktlogin.zul)
• ZK include script (ktlogin.zk)

You can download the Ajax spinner here or create your own.

My testbed:

• Apache Tomcat Version 5.5.26
• ZK 3.0.6
• Windows XP Prof Service Pack 2
  
• Mozilla Firefox 3.0