Readying your installation environment

Install the Bedework quickstart and test your environment

Before attempting any customization, please test your environment by running the quickstart release. See Getting Started. It is always wise to test your changes incrementally; test each small change to make certain you understand its effects. Doing these two things will help you understand the system and will provide useful information to the Bedework support community if you run into trouble and wish to ask for help.

Production builds begin with the Quickstart environment; use the Quickstart as the basis for your production release.

Satisfy the requirements

JDK 6
JAVA_HOME environment variable must be set in your command/shell windows
Hardware for testing: most current desktop or laptops will be adequate.
Hardware for production: A server class machine generally with at least 2Gigs allocated to the JVM (more is better).
An adequate database system. In particular, the database should support Unicode. Most Bedework installations use PostgreSQL, MySQL or Oracle. The quickstart ships with HSQL. It isn't recommended for production systems. Our recommended database is PostgresSQL.

It is helpful to understand the following technologies:

Servlet containers (e.g. Tomcat, JBoss) – JBoss, with embedded Tomcat, is the default container in Bedework.

Though not required, you may also find it useful to understand the following:

Java servlets
Some Java, should you need to interface to local systems not already supported by Bedework.

Install or ensure access to a supported database

Bedework uses Hibernate as a persistence engine. Bedework therefore should run on any database supported by Hibernate (see the listing at http://www.hibernate.org.) The list below reflects the systems on which Bedework has been successfully deployed and run:

PostgreSQL version 8
MySql version 5
Oracle Version 10 and perhaps Version 9 with Version 10 jdbc drivers.
HSQL (as shipped in the quickstart), although we don't recommend it for production systems.
Apache Derby, although we don't recommend it for production systems.