Deploying Connect Daily as a WAR

This topic provides information on deploying Connect Daily in hosted or enterprise environments.

Overview

When Sun Microsystem created Java servlets they specified a package format called a WAR file. WAR is short for Web ARchive. A WAR file is really a ZIP file with a file extension of WAR rather than ZIP. Normal zip utility programs can be used to create and modify WAR files.

Because of dependencies in Connect Daily, it will not start correctly if it cannot connect to its database. Some application servers will not deploy the WAR if the context cannot be started. This means that with some application servers, you must configure Connect Daily before deploying it as a WAR. Another issue is that some hosting servers don't unpack the WAR file so that configuration files can be edited and you may not have access to the servlet engine directories.

Detailed Instructions for Deployment

If you're trying to deploy Connect Daily in this kind of environment here are some specific tips:

1. Unpack the WAR file into an empty directory named calendar.
2. Configure the settings for Connect Daily. It may be simplest to install a working version of Connect Daily on a workstation and use it to configure the various settings for Connect Daily. Use the configuration.properties file from this installation. Copy this configuration.properties file into the unpack directory created in step 1.
3. Edit the configuration.properties file and set the database configuration entries.
4. If the server doesn't have your database driver JARs in it's class path, copy the driver JARs into the WEB-INF/lib directory of the unpacked WAR file.
5. If the server doesn't have the Java Mail API files in the class path, download the Java Mail API package from Sun and put the mail.jar and the lib/*.jar files into the WEB-INF/lib directory.
6. Download activation.jar from Sun and place it in the WEB-INF/lib directory.
7. Customize your application header and footer files in the custom/en directory.
8. Create a new WAR file. I use a command line zip program
   
   cd calendar
zip -r ..\calendar.war .

9. Deploy this new calendar.war file to your server.