the empty quarter » tomcat

BIRT Report Viewer documentation

martin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 14:15:26 +0000

Eclipse BIRT comes with Report Viewer, a J2EE application used for generating and displaying reports. Whilst deploying and using the out-of-the-box application on Tomcat is straightforward, there are fairly rich configuration and parametrization options which are non-obvious. The following two documents describe how the viewer works and how to control its behaviour.

BIRT Viewer User’s Guide (covers version 2.3, PDF)
Using the BIRT Report Viewer (covers version 2.2)

JDBC drivers in BIRT Viewer on Tomcat

martin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 14:54:15 +0000

JDBC drivers need to be put in the following location to be available in BIRT Viewer. Putting them into /common/lib does not work in BIRT and you will get a “cannot load JDBC driver” error.

/webapps/birt/WEB-INF/platform/plugins/org.eclipse.birt.report.data.oda.jdbc_2.3.1.v20080827/drivers

The Tomcat path and version number will depend on your environment.

Installing Apache Tomcat on Ubuntu server

martin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:33:49 +0000

Here’s how to install Apache Tomcat version 5.5 on an Ubuntu machine (note that there is nothing Ubutu specific in these steps). This will form one of the foundation steps for a series of posts in which we will build a fully open-source business intelligence platform.

First, install Java JDK. I am using Sun’s version mainly for stability and to avoid any compatibility issues.
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Download Apache Tomcat and check for integrity.
wget http://mirrors.sirium.net/pub/apache/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.27/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz wget http://mirrors.sirium.net/pub/apache/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.27/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz.md5 md5sum -c apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz.md5
Unpack the archive file.
tar xvzf apache-tomcat-5.5.27.tar.gz
Move the unpacked directory to its permanent location. I use /opt but this is only a personal preference.
sudo mv apache-tomcat-5.5.27 /opt
Create a simple startup and shutdown script. Run sudo vi /etc/init.d/tomcat and save it with the following content:
#!/bin/bash # Tomcat startup script export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun case $1 in start) sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/startup.sh ;; stop) sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/shutdown.sh ;; restart) sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/shutdown.sh sh /opt/apache-tomcat-5.5.27/bin/startup.sh ;; *) echo "Usage: /etc/init.d/tomcat {start|stop|restart}" exit 1 ;; esac exit 0
Don’t forget to make this script executable.
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tomcat
Now we can finally start Tomcat.
/etc/init.d/tomcat start
Finally, check that everything worked correctly by opening the Tomcat default page (http://:8080) in a web browser.