In the first of the two parts, I share my experience of installing a Composition Environment (CE) engine. In the second part of the blog, I discuss how to deploy the ES Repository on CE.
I have spent most of my time with SAP developing server-side applications. Part of my job was to install engines – from "fresh-out-of-the build" development versions to the far better productive versions. Installing them was an arduous task. More often than not they would fail and I will have to start all over again making me unproductive for a whole day. So if you are a manager of a team of 5 and if you had to choose this one guy to install an engine, who would you choose? I learnt long ago that it is never a good sign when your manager asks you to install an engine.
A few weeks before, I was that guy.
There were two things I didn’t like about engine installations. One, the number of options you were given (for an engine that you were going to use for a week!). What would be perfect, I always thought, was to provide default options that were right most of the time and give you the option to change it if required. Two, system pre-requisites. The last thing you want to know after spending 5 days installing an engine is that your engine will run sub-optimally because you don’t meet the system pre-requisites. (“You should have read the documentation”, they will say! Whoever did?!)
It was with all these reservations that I picked up the CE installation (the one available here) and started installing it on my laptop (2 GB RAM, 1.83 GHz).
The first good news – you have exactly 7 steps of configuration before you start installing the engine and it takes less than 10 minutes to get through these 7 steps. There are some intelligent assumptions (like using one master password for your J2EE Administrator, DB Administrator and DB Super user) and some avoidable questions have appropriate default values (the name of your CE instance, for example, is automatically calculated). In less than 10 minutes, you are done entering the required values and are ready to start.
The second good news is the prerequisite check. Before commencing the actual installation, it checks your page size (which wasn’t sufficient in my case) and your RAM size (which was very close to what was expected) and tells you if you can go ahead. And if like me, you wanted to change your page size, right click on 'My computer' and follow the screen shot below. This will help you spot where you can do the change.
In my case, the installation took a while because the engine takes a long time to start up the first time. Don’t panic – the startup takes longer the first time since it initializes a lot of values. However, it gets a lot better in the subsequent attempts. Also I have a 2GB RAM and I could feel the strain on my system. But my friends with 3 GB RAM said they had no issues.
The second step now was to deploy the ES Repository on the newly installed CE engine. Before going ahead, have you tried the CE installation? Do let me know what your experiences have been.
Related links -
CE / ESR download on SDN - http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/50c58b14-da6d-2a10-ca94-a3c093782...
ES Repository and Service Registry on SDN - Enterprise Services Repository&Registry
Repository Modeling and Design - http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/soa-modeling
Part II of this blog (on installing ES Repository) - Installing ES Repository on CE - Part II
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