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

Using KnowledgeTree SOAP Services from Java apps

I'm making a front-end to KnowledgeTree using the ZK Ajax framework so I eventually dipped my fingers into KT's web service integration from a Java app. My previous SOAP projects involved a Tcl client and a Google gadget using the javascript/php combo.

KnowledgeTree's wiki article on Web Service integration using Java has been most helpful. Since I'm doing my development work on Windows, I've adapted the procedures slightly. And since ZK uses the Beanshell interpreter to execute the Java code, I also modified the tester client application accordingly.

What's needed:

• Apache Axis 1.4
• Beanshell interpreter
• Java SE Runtime Environment (JRE)
• proxy classes in a jar file (ktws.jar)
  

The proxy classes were generated using the WSDL2Java utility provided by the Apache Axis. I'm providing the packaged ktws.jar available for download here. To generate the proxy classes yourself, you would need the Java Compiler and not just the JRE. Here's the batch file to generate the jar package.

set CP=axis-1_4/lib/axis.jar;axis-1_4/lib/commons-discovery-0.2.jar
set CP=%CP%;axis-1_4/lib/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar;axis-1_4/lib/jaxrpc.jar
set CP=%CP%;axis-1_4/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar;axis-1_4/lib/saaj.jar
set CP=%CP%;axis-1_4/lib/wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar
java -cp %CP% org.apache.axis.wsdl.WSDL2Java -c T1 -p com.pipoltek.ktws http://docs.pipoltek.com/ktwebservice/webservice.php?wsdl
"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\javac" -d . -classpath %CP% com/pipoltek/ktws/*.java
"%JAVA_HOME%\bin\jar" cvf ktws.jar .\com\pipoltek\ktws\*.class

Here's the Beanshell script to execute a login via SOAP.

/*
filename: ktsoaptest.bsh
to run, type from the command-line:
   java -cp bsh-2.0b4.jar bsh.Interpreter ktsoaptest.bsh
*/

// add axis classes
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/axis.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/axis-ant.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/jaxrpc.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/commons-logging-1.0.4.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/commons-discovery-0.2.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/wsdl4j-1.5.1.jar");
addClassPath ("./axis-1_4/lib/saaj.jar");

// knowledgetree proxy classes
addClassPath ("./ktws.jar");

// others
addClassPath ("./lib/activation.jar");
addClassPath ("./lib/mail.jar");

import com.pipoltek.ktws.KnowledgeTreeBindingStub;
import com.pipoltek.ktws.Kt_response;
import com.pipoltek.ktws.Kt_folder_contents;
import com.pipoltek.ktws.Kt_workflow_transitions_response;
import org.apache.axis.client.Service;
import java.net.URL;
import com.pipoltek.ktws.Kt_folder_item;
  
URL url = new URL("http://kt352c.pipoltek.com/ktwebservice/webservice.php"); 
   
KnowledgeTreeBindingStub stub = new  KnowledgeTreeBindingStub(url, new Service());
 
System.out.println("Logging into KnowledgeTree");
Kt_response response = stub.login("rexjun","cabanilla","127.0.0.1");
 
int status_code=response.getStatus_code();
String session;
if (status_code == 0) {
 session = response.getMessage();
 System.out.println("Session: " + session);
} else {
 System.out.println("Status Code: " + status_code);
  System.out.println("Session: " + response.getMessage());
  return;
}

I'll be using this piece of code to invoke SOAP services from my ZK app. More on this later..

Testing ZK Ajax Framework with iSeries/AS400 using JDBC

The ZK Ajax Framework standalone zkdemo application has a sample program that uses JDBC to provide database support to an Ajax app. I decided to give it a try using an iSeries datasource. Here's how it was done..

ZK downloads are here.

- Download ZK-quickstart-x.y.z.pdf
- Download and install Tomcat. I used version 5.5 as this was the version referred to in the manual.
- Download zk-demo-x.y.z.zip and extract the package. Copy the zkdemo.war package to the webapps directory of Tomcat (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5)
- Restart Tomcat and open the url http://localhost:8080/zkdemo/userguide/

Shutdown Tomcat. I copied the ...\webapps\zkdemo directory to ...\webapps\myzk so I can make changes to the sample code without touching the demo application. I then copied ...\webapps\myzk\userguide\dbconnect\jdbc.zul to ...\webapps\myzk\dbconnect\jdbc.zul and modified the submit() function, as follows:

void submit() {
  // Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver");
  // DriverManager.registerDriver(new com.ibm.as400.access.AS400JDBCDriver());
  Class.forName("com.ibm.as400.access.AS400JDBCDriver");
  // String url = "jdbc:odbc:Fred";
  String mySchema = "REXJUN1";
  String myAS400 = "m170pub1.rzkh.de";
  String myUserId = "REXJUN";
  String myPasswd = "-change-me-";
  String url = "jdbc:as400://" + myAS400 + "/" + mySchema;
  Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection(url,myUserId, myPasswd);
  PreparedStatement stmt = con.prepareStatement("INSERT INTO BASICJDBC values(?,   ?)");
  //insert what end user entered into database table
  stmt.setString(1, id.value);
  stmt.setString(2, name.value);
  //execute the statement
  stmt.executeUpdate();
  //commit
  con.commit();
  //close the jdbc connection
  con.close();
}

Add the jt400.jar from JTOpen to the ...\webapps\myzk\WEB-INF\lib directory. This jar file contains the JDBC driver for iSeries.

Restart Tomcat. Opening the url http://localhost:8080/myzk/dbconnect/jdbc.zul should give you this..


A wrong password does not trigger an error and the application seems to hang -- the host system may have requested a password re-entry but the UI failed to render.

Reviewing the file contents shows the successful addition of new records..


ZK also released ZK Mobile 0.8.7 for the mobile platform on November 07, 2007.