It's a fairly well known fact that you can get WebLogic server 8.1 running on the Mac, thanks to some scripts and instructions published by Rod Chavez earlier in the year. I followed these last night and, give or take a few script tweaks, it does all work. Now that I'm using WebLogic at work, I wanted to take this a step further and install WebLogic Workshop too.

The good news is that is works although I'll write that up tomorrow. For the moment I wanted to write a quick note about an alternative way to install WLS. I have a set of BEA CDs from the JavaOne conference last month that contain the installs for the WebLogic platform (i.e. WLS, Workshop, Portal, WLI, etc) on Win32 and Linux. Having seen blogs saying that the Linux installer does actually work, I decided to give it a go.

The Linux disc contains a 400Mb bin file and extracting this with StuffIt (by double clicking it) is the first step in the install. After about 15 minutes (I'm running a G4 866Mhz), you get an exploded directory called something like platform812_linux32_eval.bin Folder. Inside this folder is a file called AUTORUN.INF and this contains the command that kicks off the installer. As it stands, that doesn't work "out of the box" so I modified it as follows (I have split this across multiple lines at the colon character).

java -Xmx256m -cp .:bids.jar:3rdparty.jar:comdev.jar:wizard.jar:
  wls8120_242_COMP_linux32.jar:wlp8120_242_COMP_linux32.jar:
  wli8120_242_COMP_linux32.jar:psu8120_242_COMP_linux32.jar:
  wlw8120_242_COMP_linux32.jar com.bea.plateng.wizard.WizardController

By default this runs the GUI installer and after a few seconds you get the usual window. Stepping through the installer gives you the chance to set up a BEA home and install any or all of the products in the WebLogic platform.

After the install has completed, you get the chance to run the setup wizard to configure your newly installed WebLogic server and I'm happy to report that this all works too.

All that's left is a quick ./startWebLogic.sh in your server directory and WLS on Mac OS X is up and running.

A widely known problem with WLS on Mac is that the navigation applet in the sidebar doesn't work properly. I actually did see this working today (once!) in Safari although the main pages don't display properly. FireFox (as shown) does a good job of rendering the console and all the features seem usable. The only area I did seem to have problems with is uploading WARs/EARs/etc to be deployed. Perhaps it's just very slow. Speaking of performance, with a clean install, no sample applications and a clean domain/server config, WebLogic server is pretty snappy on my 12" PowerBook and startup time isn't all that bad. Deployment is quick and while JSP page compilation is a little lethargic, once you're running everything works well.

I don't know how well this Linux install compares to the AIX (generic) version but I've encountered no problems so far. Tomorrow I'll write up something about Workshop and Builder.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 20 July 2004 21:42:57 BST #