OpenLaszlo Newbie

Greetings,

Took a look at the OpenLaszlo video, and was very impressed that you can add drag and drop to web pages, using either Flash or DHTML. I am interested in the second because I want to be able to generate pages that can be run on Firefox from any platform. I could give a...
well, I'll try to keep this post civil, lets just say Internet Explorer is not my favorite browser.

The other thing I like, is it looks like you can get very creative, and only need the ISP to host normal web pages.

First step was to get OpenLaszlo installed. I must admit, I've been struggling a bit with this one.

I am running Ubuntu 6.06. Yes, I know that's about three or four releases behind the times. But I don't want to mess with a working system and take a chance on breaking something.

I did get the files downloaded and safely tucked away in another partition.

The first challenge was getting JAVA_PATH correctly specified. Went searching for the SDK, with find, but with little luck. Did a which java, and it ended pointing to my JRE, not my JDK.

Downloaded the latest JDK got the environment variable defined and exported in a terminal window, then executed the startup.sh and low and behold, I can now run http://localhost:8080/lps-4.1.1/examples/hello.lzx and see the Hello Laszlo web page.

OK, I say to myself, how about adding a panel button for starting Tomcat.

Now a word of explanation. I'm running everything on this laptop. For development work, I run as a normal user with a user id dedicated for that purpose. I don't want root privilege for this, and worse case scenario, I can save my data and blow away the user if anything un-nice happens. Likewise, I don't want to start Tomcat as part of the normal system services. Yes, I know it would be fun, but it is also a potential vector for bad things, and I want to limit it to when I really need it.

However the long and the short of it is, I can create a bash shell script to set the environment variable and start Tomcat, and that works fine. Tomcat remains running even after I shut down the terminal window.

However if I launch the script as a button from a panel, it doesn't work.

The command is ./Start_Tomcat/start_stop_tomcat.sh

It is set to run in a terminal.

Here is the script:

# Begin Script.
# Display a simple menue.
echo "Simple menu to Start or Stop Tomcat."
echo
echo "Enter 1 to Start Tomcat."
echo "Enter 2 to Stop Tomcat."
echo

# Get a selection.

read start_stop

#probably should make the following simpler, don't really need the case.

case $start_stop in
1)
okToProceed=1
;;
2)
okToProceed=2
;;
*)
echo ""
echo "Please enter '1' or '2'."
;;
esac

# That third case is useless, because I don't loop.

#set the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java_sdk/jdk1.6.0_10
export JAVA_HOME
PATH=$PATH:/kubuntu/develope/Open_Lazlo/lps-4.1.1/Server/tomcat-5.0.24/bin
export PATH

# Don't pay any attention to the partition name. At one point I was thinking of installing different versions of Linux, but this Ubuntu does everything I need. The kubuntu is just a leftover partition name.

if [ $okToProceed = "1" ] ; then

# Selection 1 will start Tomcat.

echo "Starting Tomcat"
/kubuntu/develope/Open_Lazlo/lps-4.1.1/Server/tomcat-5.0.24/bin/startup.sh
echo "Tomcat Started"

else

# I know I said enter 2 to stop Tomcat, but in reality, anything other than a 1 will stop Tomcat.

echo "Stopping Tomcat"
/kubuntu/develope/Open_Lazlo/lps-4.1.1/Server/tomcat-5.0.24/bin/shutdown.sh
echo "Tomcat Stopped"

fi

# This final read will force the terminal window to remain open until there is an input.

read cont < /dev/tty

# End of Script.

So what this means is that as long as the window remains open, Tomcat will continue to run.

The question I have is why is it that when this terminal window closes, my Tomcat stops, but when I launch a normal terminal window and run the script, Tomcat continues to run until I run the shutdown.sh, even if I close the terminal window I used to start Tomcat?

Yeah, I've a bad habit with run on sentences.

By the way, the shutdown.sh works just fine from the panel button, as I would expect. It's just the start that has got me puzzled.

If I ever figure out what I need to do to keep it running from the panel, I'll post the answer.

Meanwhile, I will post what I learn as I explore OpenLaszlo.