Getting started with the application server

As far as hardware requirements are concerned, you should be aware that the server distribution, at the time of writing, requires about 150 MB of hard disk space and allocates a minimum of 64 MB and a maximum of 512 MB for a standalone server.

In order to get started, we are going to perform the following steps:

1. Download and install the Java Development Kit.
2. Download and install WildFly 8.
3. Download and install the Eclipse development environment. While we will use Eclipse in this book, you are free to use your IDE of choice.

At the end of this chapter, you will have all the required software installed and will be ready to start working with the application server.

Installing the Java environment

WildFly is written in Java; therefore it needs a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) in which to run, along with the standard edition Java libraries. So, before we can get started setting up or learning about WildFly, we first need to install the Java Development Kit (JDK).

To use WildFly, you will need at least Java SE 7 or above. Although there is no plan to use Java 8 language changes within the WildFly 8.x source code, WildFly is compiled against Java 8. It is recommended that you use the latest version of Java SE 8 to run WildFly.

So, let's move to the Oracle download page, http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html, which now hosts all JDK downloads, as shown in the following screenshot:

This will take you to the download page for the latest JDK. At the time of writing, this was Java 8 update 5. You will need to accept the license agreement before downloading the JDK. Choose to download the latest version of Java for your operating system. Have a look at the following screenshot:

The download will take a few minutes depending how fast your network is.

Installing Java on Linux

Installing Java on Linux is very straightforward. Once the download is complete, extract the tar.gz file to your chosen install location. This command extracts the archive to your current directory:

Next, you need to add the path as an environment variable. This can be achieved by adding the following lines to your user profile script (the .profile file found in your home directory):

Installing Java on Windows

Windows users can simply run the executable (.exe) file to start the installation. The name of the installer varies depending on the operating system and your system architecture (32-bit or 64-bit); however, the steps will be the same-just the name will change. At the time of writing, the installer for the latest version of Java for 64-bit Windows is called jdk-8u5-windows-x64.exe.

When using Windows, you should stay away from installation paths that include empty spaces, such as C:\Program Files, as this leads to some issues when referencing the core libraries. An installation path such as C:\Software\Java or simply C:\Java is a better alternative.

When the installation is complete, you will need to update a couple of settings on the computer so that it will know where to find Java. The most important setting is JAVA_HOME, which is directly referenced by the WildFly startup script.

If you are running Windows XP/2000, follow these steps:

1. Right-click on My Computer, and select Properties from the context menu.
2. On the Advanced tab, click on the Environment Variables button.
3. Then, in the System variables box, click on New.
4. Name the new variable JAVA_HOME, and give a value of the path to your JDK installation; I recommend something like C:\Java\jdk1.8.0_05.

   Tip

   
   

   Windows 7 tip

   Because of increased security in Windows 7, standard users must have User Account Control (UAC) turned on to change the environment variables, and the change must be completed via user accounts. In the User Accounts window, under Tasks, select Change my environment variables. Use the New, Edit, or Delete button to amend environment variables

5. Now it's time to modify the system's PATH variable. Double-click on the PATH system variable. In the box that pops up, navigate to the end of the Variable Value line, add a semicolon to the end, and then add the path to your JDK. This will be something like %JAVA_HOME%\bin.

Installing WildFly 8

The WildFly application server can be downloaded for free from the WildFly site, http://www.wildfly.org/downloads/. Have a look at the following screenshot:

You will notice that there is an option to download a minimalistic core distribution. This is aimed at developers who want to build their own application runtime using the WildFly 8 architecture.

Choose to download the full Java EE7 distribution. Like JBoss AS 7, WildFly does not come with an installer. It is simply a matter of extracting the compressed archive to a location of your choosing.

Linux users can extract the file using the tar or unzip command (depending on the type of compressed file you downloaded):

For those of you using Windows, you can use WinZip or WinRAR, taking care to choose a folder that does not contain empty spaces.

Tip

Security warning

Unix/Linux users should be aware that WildFly does not require root privileges, as none of the default ports used by WildFly are below the privileged port range of 1024. To reduce the risk of users gaining root privileges through WildFly, install and run WildFly as a non-root user.

Starting WildFly

After installing WildFly, it is wise to perform a simple startup test to validate that there are no problems with your Java configuration. To test your installation, move to the bin directory of your WildFly install and issue the following command:

• For Linux/Unix users: $ ./standalone.sh
• For Windows users: > standalone.bat

The following screenshot shows a sample WildFly 8 startup console:

The preceding command starts up a WildFly standalone instance that's equivalent to starting the application server with the run.sh script used by releases prior to JBoss AS 7. The run.sh file remains in the WildFly bin directory but is merely a placeholder and will not start the application server.

Notice how fast the application server starts. This is due to the modular architecture of WildFly. Essential services are started concurrently on boot-up, and non-critical services are started only when needed, resulting in an exceptionally fast startup. Local caching means that the server will start even quicker second time round!

If you need to customize the startup properties of your application server, then you need to open and modify the standalone.conf file (or standalone.conf.bat for Windows users). This file contains the memory requirements of WildFly. The following is the Linux core section of it:

Tip

Java SE 8 users

PermGen has been replaced with Metaspace in Java 8. If you are using Java 8, then remove the -XX:MaxPermSize=256m property from the standalone.conf file, and replace it with -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=256m. This will prevent VM warnings being printed to your WildFly logs on startup.

By default, the application server starts with a minimum heap space memory requirement of 64 MB and a maximum requirement of 512 MB. This will be just enough to get started; however, if you need to run a core Java EE application on it, you will likely require a minimum of 1 GB of heap space....