Installing JacORB

In this chapter we explain how to obtain and install JacORB and give an overview of the package contents.

Obtaining and Installing JacORB

JacORB can be obtained as a gzipped tar-archive or as a zip-Archive from the JacORB home page at http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~brose/jacorb/. It can also be downloaded via anonymous ftp from ftp.inf.fu-berlin.de from the directory pub/jacorb/.

To install JacORB, just gunzip and untar (or unzip) the archive somewhere. This will result in a new directory JacORB_0.9/. Make sure your CLASSPATH environment variable contains the path to the installation directory and, additionally, the subdirectory classes/. Extend your search path with JacORB/bin, so that the shell scripts and batch files for the utilities in this directory are found.

Preprocessor, Make

Also make sure some C-Preprocessor is in your search path and can be used by calling cpp. If your preprocessor is not called cpp you need to edit the file jacorb/bin/idl2j so that your local preprocessor is used.

Another word on non-Unix platforms: JacORB will run on any JavaVM, but working and developing software with JacORB (and recompiling examples) is much easier if a "make" utility (such as GNU's or Miscrosoft's nmake) is present on your system. If you do not have one installed, I recommend downloading one, e.g. the UNIX tools from the gnuwin32 project (see www.cygnus.com). However, when using Windows/DOS, the makefiles need to be adapted so as to use " " as a file separator rather than "/".

Configuration

To configure a few JacORB options and defaults, have a look at the file jacorb/Orb/Config.java. Here is an example:

package jacorb.Orb;

public final class Config 
{
        // how often do we retry to connect, and how long do we wait 
        // before trying again (in msecs)?

   public static final int   retry           = 10;
   public static final long  retry_intvl     = 400;

        // network buffer size

   public static final int OUTBUFSIZE = 4096;

        // the "classpath" that makes up the Interface Repository

   public static final String   IR_server = 
                 "http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~brose/IR_location";

        // identifies the default naming context to be used
        // a string in URL format pointing to a file resource 

   public static final String   default_context = 
                 "http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/~brose/NS_Ref";
}

Configurable options include the size of network buffers, the number of retries JacORB makes if a connection cannot be established, and how long it shall wait before retrying. The two string values for IR_server and default_context are URL's for file resources used to set up the JacORB name server and the server for the Interface Repository. These URLs will be used by the ORB to locate the servers and to provide object references to them (see also section 3).

After modifying this file, please type make configure in the JacORB installation directory. This will recompile all files in the distribution which depend on the configuration file.

Before testing the examples in jacorb/demo/ you should also have a look at the (simple) file Makefile.config -- simply adjust the paths in this file to reflect your local installation. You can now test your installation by typing make in one of the subdirectories of the jacorb/demo/ directory which contains a number of examples for using JacORB. Alternatively, you can make all examples in one go if you type make in the jacorb/demo/ directory. If everything compiles, you should be done with the installation.