Days of …|Just another rants and opinions weblog

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After rave reviews from my coworkers, who seen the IBM presentation, I decided to give it a try on my local machine. As it usually happens with IBM beta software, the expectancy of it working is close to zero. Let’s give it a try this time, could it be better?

First, I headed to http://jazz.net/ to download software. The server, obviously, managed by IBM marketing department, requires to register. Usual IBM ID is not supported, so I had to give IBM my email once again.

Since I only need a software for basic trial, I decided not to download version, which supports DB2 and Oracle databases. There is no support for MySQL either, but at least they promise to include Derby in setup package. So I pointed that I want Windows installation and found that download size is about 400Mb, and there is no IBM Download Manager (which I hate) to be seen.

So I downloaded and unpacked everything to my hard drive. I am on Windows and Windows users are used to find setup.exe, which does installation of the software for you. There is no such thing here: only install_express_c.html file, which describes step by step installation procedure for both Windows and Linux. Why Linux if I specifically stated that I want Windows installation?

First step says that I have to navigate to Tomcat’s folder and then run server.startup.bat file. There is no such file! The actual file named startup.bat. So I executed it, new command line window popped out and it is full of exceptions. Something about IbmX509 KeyStoreManager is nowhere to be found. Of course it can not be found because I am not running IBM JVM! What kind of assumption is to expect that everybody in the world are on IBM JVM, huh? I had to dig into Tomcat’s server.xml to set it to use Sun’s X509 keymanager (simply open tomcat/conf/server.xml, find IbmX509 and replace it with SunX509).

After quick restart Tomcat is happy and I can open, according to instructions, Jazz setup screen, which is a web application running within Tomcat. The setup has two options: “Fast Path” and “Custom setup”. I’ve chosen Fast Path because I am happy with the defaults, whatever they are. Click on “Fast Path” gets me to “Setup User Registry” screen, which has “A problem occurred while loading User Registry settings.” error message displayed. Hmm… Let’s head back to installation guide:

The default user name and password are case-sensitive:

• The user name is ADMIN.
• The password is ADMIN.

If you configured the LDAP directory Web container, log in with a JazzAdmin user that is defined in your LDAP directory.

What? I have to configure LDAP directory Web container first? This is first time it mentioned in this “guide”! How do I do that? There is no answer.

Ok, Fast Path is broken, so let’s try Custom setup. Click. “Loading Database Connection settings…” No progress here as well. Nothing about such problems in tomcat logs, nothing in server troubleshooting section of installation guide.

So there is no Rational Team Concert for me for now. Would I recommend it for use on my next project? 

Update: Decided to dig around filesystem, looking for something useful like logs and other batch files. Found some logs in Tomcat cache folders (tomcat/work/Catalina/localhost) with the ClassNotFound messages. Found jars, containing missing class and added it to CLASSPATH. No help.

Then found mentioned above server.startup.bat and tried to run it. Now it complained about SunX509 KeyManager, so I returned the IbmX509 KeyManager back. Still no help progressing with Jazz Setup…

And then I decided to run repotools.bat – just in case the repository got corrupted or something. Execited it with parameter –createTables, it done something with something.

Tried Jass Setup page again and now it worked! Whoa!