Chapter 2. Installation Decisions
This chapter first helps you decide which type of WAF installation you are undertaking. This followed by a discussion of other decisions about your install environment, such as operating system, RDBMS, JRE, and servlet container. After reading this chapter, you should be able to easily find the installation and configuration information you need to perform your deployment.
2.1. Production or Development Installation
There are two types of installation to consider, with some flavoring to each type of deployment.
One type is a production installation, covered in Part II Installation for Production. Such a system is focused entirely on the delivery of Web services to client browsers, and can be designed in a manner to best fit your enterprise.
The other type is the development installation, covered in Part III Installation for Development. Development installs include deploying with binary applications for developing on top of WAF, as well as deploying source directories for modifying WAF, CMS, Portal Server and so forth.
Review this list to see where your plans and environment fit:
- Production Installation
If you are installing your custom applications on another server, and the applications have already been built and packaged into RPM packages, then you only need a production install.
If you will not be doing development on this particular server, and the applications being installed have all necessary code, stylesheets, etc. included, then you will only need to do a production installation.
The production install procedure is used not just for production servers but for any server which is not used for development. For example, if you will have multiple front end servers which will connect to the same production database, the full install procedure will only be followed for the first server, and an abbreviated process will be followed for subsequent front end servers, backup servers, and the like. This is described in Part II Installation for Production.
- Development Installation
You will only need to do a development installation if you will be building applications on top of WAF or modifying existing WAF applications, including XSLT styling changes. The two different methods of a development install are:
If you are only going to be building applications on top of WAF (i.e., not modifying any WAF code), a standard development installation includes packages installed as prebuilt, binary-only applications from RPM (or ZIP).
If you need to extend or modify an existing Red Hat Applications, then you will need to include the specific application as a custom application within your build system. Use the code in the source package distribution as the basis for your custom application. For more information, refer to Section 3.6 Obtaining Red Hat WAF and Application Packages.
Caution Modifying the source is not generally recommended. You will not be running on an officially supported, upgradeable version of the software. If you absolutely must modify the source, we strongly encourage you to submit your patch via https://bugzilla.redhat.com so that it can be considered for merging into the next release.