Installing LiveTime on Mac OS X Server
This is probably the most obscure post ever – but I need to put it up here, in case it helps someone, somewhere at some point.
I recently had a consulting job, where the client wanted a little help with a software installation of some ‘enterprise’ software at their office. (Quite why the business community have decided that their software needs to be labelled ‘enterprise’ still eludes me – it makes it sound like a naval vessel.)
Anyway – this business runs Mac OS X server (10.5) and needed to install a web app called LiveTime. LiveTime used to be a WebObjects application (the history of WebObjects is a fascinating topic – which I won’t go into here) but now is almost entirely Java-based and runs from an instance of the Apache Foundation‘s Tomcat application server. Apache are the fine, fine people who brought us the Apache web server, which is basically the back-bone of the Web: it serves the majority (apparently 70%) of web sites that you’ll ever visit (including this one.)
Mac OS X Server comes with Tomcat built-in – so I started by trying to deploy the web application through the built-in version of Tomcat (which seemed pretty up to date.) That didn’t go well and I got errors from Tomcat when I tried accessing the webapp along the lines of ‘Servlet WOServletAdaptor is not available.’
Googling this error message only lead to WebObjects developers on Apple’s WebObjects mailing list attempting to deploy applications that they had written themselves. Googling for ‘LiveTime’ and this error got one result, which wasn’t useful.
It’s quite telling how you can often solve open-source application install issues, simply by googling, yet with proprietary apps, you have to go through their own support systems due to lack of public information. I’m not saying that LiveTime’s support was bad – in fact I got (24 hours later) very good support from a very nice, very knowledgeable and very busy Aussie who walked me through the install process. I do wonder, however, how much more quickly the issue would have been resolved if I hadn’t had to call the vendor.
So, one of the first things that I learned from my support guy was that the supplied Tomcat install on Mac OS X server wasn’t quite right for their software. Once I’d installed a fresh copy in /usr/local/ (instead of the default Mac OS X Server /Library/Tomcat/ install) things went a lot more smoothly, although not entirely smoothly. Apache and Tomcat weren’t playing well together – The LiveTime application was serving most of the application correctly from Tomcat’s own webserver on port 8080, but Apache (on the normal port of 80) simply couldn’t get a proper connection to the Tomcat server via its Jakarta Connector.
At this point the support guy and I hit a wall and I spent the next day working though each part of the install trying to work out where we were going wrong. After a lot of hair-pulling I figured it out: it turns out that the bridge by which Apache and Tomcat were trying to communicate (mod_jk – the Jakarta module for Apache) could not get up and running because the port it was trying to use (8009) was already in use by Mac OS X Server’s iCal Server.
So – if you’re trying to install LiveTime on Mac OS X server note the following:
1 – don’t use the installed version of TomCat which comes with Mac OS X Server – install a fresh version in /usr/local or /opt/local
2 – don’t use the suggested port for the jk worker, pick another.
Tom says:
Welcome back to blogging!
My 2p on WebObjects stuff: never use WebObjects. There’s just not enough developers who know the technology to make it in anyway viable , you end up paying LOADS for average developers to maintain stuff that even Apple seem to have no interest in supporting properly.
RE: “enterprise” it’s to make them feel important and to allow companies to charge more money. We’re just doing stuff companies are engaged in grand enterprises
August 1st, 2008 at 10:08 am
Diggory says:
Thanks Tom. Yes: Apple have abandoned WebObjects – LiveTime are moving away from it and there’s only a small amount of that tech left in their app.
WO itself is still a very interesting subject, of which I don’t know enough to fully declaim, but it seems to me that it was the Rails of its day (ten years ago, which is an eon in internet time) – but was suffocated by being proprietary and very, VERY, expensive.
August 8th, 2008 at 1:20 am