With so many options in Java EE application servers, why choose GlassFish? Besides the obvious advantage of GlassFish being available free of charge, it offers the following benefits:

Before GlassFish can be installed, a recent version of the Java Development Kit must be present in your system and (optionally) the Apache ANT tool.

Once the dependencies have been installed, copy the file downloaded in the previous section to an appropriate installation location and run the following command from a terminal window:

java -Xmx256m -jar glassfish-installer-v2-b58g.jar

After running this command, a window prompting you to accept the license terms will show up.

Scroll all the way down and click on the button labeled Accept.

You should see a lot of text scrolling on your terminal window, after the text stops scrolling, you should see the following text at the bottom of your terminal window:

installation complete.

The installer creates a directory called glassfish at the location where we ran the above command from.

Although we saw the above message when we completed the step required in the previous paragraph, we are not quite done installing GlassFish. Inside the glassfish directory, there is an ANT build script that must be executed to complete the installation. The file name for this build script is setup.xml. This script can be executed from the command line by changing to the GlassFish installation directory and typing the following command:

ant -f setup.xml

After executing this command you should see the following message at the bottom of the terminal the time taken may vary:

BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 43 seconds

We have now successfully installed GlassFish and we are ready to start it for the first time.

To further test that our GlassFish installation is running properly, we will deploy a war (Web ARchive) file and make sure it deploys and executes properly. Before moving on, please download the file simpleapp.war from this book's website.

Deploying an Application through the Web Console

To deploy simpleapp.war, open a browser and navigate to the following URL: http://localhost:4848; you should be greeted with a login screen that looks like the following:

The default administrator user name/password combination is admin/adminadmin and log in using these credentials; you should see a page like the following:

Note

Changing the Administrator Password

It is good practice to change the default administrator password. To change your administrator password click on the Application Server menu item at the top left, then click on the Administrator Password tab. Then enter and confirm the new administrator password and click on the Save button.

Now, click on the Deploy Web Application item on the main page (highlighted in the previous screenshot). You should now see a screen like the following:

The war file can either be deployed by "uploading it" to the server (this functionality is there to upload files to remote servers; in our case the workstation and server are one and the same), or by navigating the file system to select the desired war file.

Even though our server and workstation are one and the same, we will use the upload option as navigation is much easier (selecting the local packaged file option will result in us having to navigate through the whole directory tree; by selecting the upload option we only have to navigate from our home directory).

After clicking on the Browse button and navigating to the location of simpleapp.war, the screen will look similar to this:

Notice how the Application Name and Context Root text fields are automatically filled out.

Clicking on the OK button at the top right of the page will deploy the application.

As can be seen in the screenshot above, our simpleapp application now has been deployed.

To execute the simpleapp application, type the following URL in the browser's location text field: http://localhost:8080/simpleapp/simpleservlet. The resulting page should look like this:

That's it! We have successfully deployed our first Java EE application.

Undeploying an Application through the Web Console

In the next section, we explain how to deploy a web application through the command line. In order for the instructions in the next section to work, we need to undeploy simpleapp.war.

To undeploy the application that we deployed in the previous section, log in to the GlassFish web console by typing the following URL in the browser: http://localhost:4848 and entering the admin user name and corresponding password.

Then click on the Web Applications menu item near the top left of the page and click on the checkbox by simpleapp web application.

Then click on the Undeploy button; the application will be undeployed and removed from the list of deployed applications.

[#|2007-02-13T20:57:41.825-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.tools.deployment|_ThreadID=23;_ThreadName=Timer-4;|deployed with moduleid = simpleapp|#]
[#|2007-02-13T20:57:42.100-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.tools.deployment|_ThreadID=23;_ThreadName=Timer-4;|[AutoDeploy] Successfully autodeployed : /opt/glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy/simpleapp.war.|#]

asadmin deploy [path to file]/simpleapp.war

[#|2007-02-15T18:03:13.879-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.tools.deployment|_ThreadID=15;_ThreadName=Thread-25;|deployed with moduleid = simpleapp|#]

[#|2007-02-13T21:04:43.753-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.tools.deployment|_ThreadID=23;_ThreadName=Timer-4;|Autoundeploying application :simpleapp|#]
[#|2007-02-13T21:04:44.023-0500|INFO|sun-appserver9.1|javax.enterprise.system.tools.deployment|_ThreadID=23;_ThreadName=Timer-4;|[AutoDeploy] Successfully autoundeployed : /opt/glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy/simpleapp.war.|#]

asadmin undeploy simpleapp

Command undeploy executed successfully.

Additional domains can be created from the command line by issuing the following command:

asadmin create-domain domainname

The above command takes several parameters to specify ports where the domain will listen to for several services (HTTP, Admin, JMS, IIOP, secure HTTP, etc.); type the following command in the command line to see this parameters:

asadmin create-domain --help

If we want several domains to execute concurrently on the same server, these ports must be chosen carefully, because specifying the same ports for different services (or even the same service across domains) will prevent one of the domains from working properly.

The default ports for the default domain1 domain are listed in the following table:

Please note that when creating a domain, the only port that needs to be specified is the admin port; if the other ports are not specified, the default ports listed in the table above will be used. Care must be taken when creating a domain, because, as explained above, two domains cannot run concurrently in the same server if any of their services listen for connections on the same port.

An alternative method of creating a domain, without having to specify ports for every service, is to issue the following command:

asadmin createdomain --portbase [port number] domainname

The value of the --portbase parameter dictates the base port for the domain; ports for the different services will be offsets of the given port number. The following table lists the ports assigned to all the different services.

Of course, care must be taken when choosing the value for portbase, making sure that none of the assigned ports collide with any other domain.

Deleting a domain is very simple; it can be accomplished by issuing the following command in the command line:

asadmin delete-domain domainname

We should see a message like the following on the terminal window:

Domain domainname deleted.

Please use the above command with care; once a domain is deleted, it cannot be easily recreated (all deployed applications will be gone, as well as any connection pools, data sources, etc.).

A domain that is executing can be stopped by issuing the following command:

asadmin stop-domain domainname

The above command will stop the domain named domainname.

Any non-trivial Java EE application will connect to a Relational Database Management Server (RDBMS). Supported RDBMS systems include JavaDB, Oracle, Derby, Sybase, DB2, Pointbase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Informix, Cloudscape, and SQL Server. In this section, we will demonstrate how to set up GlassFish to communicate with PostgreSQL; the procedure is similar for others.

The first step to follow when setting up a connection pool is to copy the JAR file containing the JDBC driver for our RDBMS in the lib directory of the domain (consult your RDBMS documentation for information on where to obtain this JAR file). If the GlassFish domain where we want to add the connection pool is running when copying the JDBC driver, it must be restarted for the change to take effect.

The domain can be restarted by executing asadmin stop-domain domain1 followed by executing asadmin start-domain domain1.

Once the JDBC driver has been copied to the appropriate location and the application server has been restarted, log in to the admin console by pointing the browser to http://localhost:4848 (assuming the current domain is listening on the default admin port).

Then click on Resources->JDBC->Connection Pools; the browser should now look something like this:

Click on the New... button; after entering the appropriate values for our RDBMS, the page should look something like this:

After entering the appropriate data for the RDBMS and clicking the Next button, you should see a page like the following:

Most of the default values on this page are sensible; scroll all the way down and enter the appropriate data for our RDBMS, then click on the Finish button at the top right of the screen.

Our newly created connection pool should now be visible in the list of connection pools.

After clicking on the JNDI name for the new connection pool, and clicking on the Ping button, you should see a message like the following:

Our connection pool is now ready to be used by our applications.

Java EE applications don't access connection pools directly, instead they access a data source, which points to a connection pool. To set up a new data source, click on the JDBC Resources menu item on the left-hand side of the web console, then click on the New... button.

After filling out the appropriate information for our new data source, you should see a page like this:

After clicking the OK button, you can see our newly created data source: