How to add a WSO2 Carbon server to cApps

You can add WSO2 Carbon Servers to Carbon Studio and deploy, undeploy artefacts created from cApp. This is how you do it.

1. You need to have a binary distribution of a WSO2 Carbon Server with you. For this post I will be using WSO2 Gadget Server. Download it from here and extract.

2. Install Carbon Studio in you eclipse IDE as described in here.

3. In the 'Server view', right click and Select New > Server and the "New Server" wizard will appear.

4. Scroll down in the servers types until and you'll see 'WSO2' at the very bottom. Expand this and there'll be two server types. 
   i. WSO2 Carbon 3.0.1 based Server
  ii. WSO2 Carbon 3.1 based Servers
Select the server type based on the binary you had extracted in step 1 above. I will be using 'WSO2 Carbon 3.0.1 based Server' which matches the distro I downloaded in step 1.

5. After selecting the server type, you can change the 'Server's host name', 'Server Name' if you want or can leave with defaults.

6. Then we need to set the 'Server runtime environment'. Click on the 'Add..' link next to 'Server runtime environment' field and it will open up a window for you to select the runtime.

In this, browse for you Carbon Home, that is you need to browse for the location where you extracted the Carbon Server distribution. Press 'Finish' and return to parent window.

7. In the parent window proced to the next step, where its asking you to set the ports for your server. You can accespt defeault ot change as you wish. In my case I am changing first two ports as the Gadget Server runs on 8080/8443 by default.

You also can enable options such as;
  i. Bring up the carbon home in the browser when this server starts -
Will launch server's admin console in you browser, after ther server is started via cApp.

 ii. Enable hot update of published server modules -
Hot update feature will be enabled where all changes you do to your deplyed modules will be updated then and there (without you restarting the server).

iii.Enable osgi console -
osgi prompt will appear at the server startup and you will be able run osgi commands on the start-up console.

8. In the next step it will give you a panel where you can add\remove applications to your server. For the time being let's not add applications now and we'll only start the server. So press 'Finish'.

9. Now you'll find your server appearing in the 'Server view'. Right click on it and select start from the menu. And the server will be gracefully started !!!.

Creating a WSO2 artifact using Eclipse

As was shown in my previous article, we have a plugin which can be added to eclipse which will open you a development environment to create artefacts used in WSO2 products. Now lets see how we can create WSO2 product artefacts in this environment.

So to start off with, you need to have eclipse IDE, (preferably, eclipse-jee-galileo) and install WSO2 cApp following the steps in here.

After WSO2 cApp is installed and the IDE is restarted, do following;

1. Create a WSO2 project
Go to File > New > Project. This will open up the 'New Project' wizard.
You have two menu options for this:

• You can either select 'Carbon Application Project' option that appear at the beginning of the list.

• Or you can select 'WSO2' at the bottom, which will also give 'Carbon Application Project' when you expand it.

In the next step, give your project a name and 'finish' the wizard.

Now you'll have a project created (with the name you gave) in the 'Project Explore'. Expand the project folder and you'll find its initial content as shown below;

• JRE System library - Jars from your java runtime
• java-src -the place where you keep the java src files
• Artifacts - you will have this empty when you start. Later when you create an artifact, it will appear inside this.
• root-artifact.xml - Is the place which manages you project
• Server Roles - Server roles that you can specify for each of your artefact.

2. Create an artifact
Double click on root-artifact.xml. Click on 'Create New Artifact' button. You will get a drop down menu, which will have all WSO2 artifacts that are supported up to now.

From the menu simply select the artifact you need to create.

I will explain how to create few ESB artefacts in my next posts.

How to install WSO2 cApp in eclipse

Am using eclipse-jee-galileo-linux-gtk.tar.gz for this. and a milestone release of WSO2 cApp plugin, which can be downloaded from here.

1. Firstly extract you eclipse distribution and launch it.

2. Then Go to Help menu and select "Install Software"

3. Click on the 'Add' button at the top corner of the 'Install' DBox to add the location where the software resides.

4. In the 'Add site' DBox, click on 'Archive' button and navigate to the location where you downloaded WSO2 cApp plugin (wso2-eclipse-ide-tools-1.0.0.M11.zip).

5. When the achive is added, all the software available in it will appear in the small text area below it.
Remember : You need to have "group items by category" checkbox unchecked.

4. Out of the above list, select "WSO2 Carbon Studio Feature" and press Next to proceed and move on until completion.

That's it. Now you have WSO2 cApp integrated to eclipse IDE.