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What is bundled with Apache Rave?

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When you download and run the demo binaries of Apache Rave you see the demo portal in your browser on http://localhost:8080. The demo portal is built using Spring MVC for the request handling, Spring Security to manage access to the portal and OpenJPA for persistence. There are also other services running in the demo binary. In this blogpost I’ll give you a short overview of the bundled services.

OpenSocial container

Most of the demo widgets you see in the portal are OpenSocial gadgets. In order to render these we bundle Apache Shindig with Apache Rave. The Apache Shindig server runs on the root context. We’re working hard to implement all necessary OpenSocial calls. As an example you can retrieve all people connected to "canonical" user: http://localhost:8080/social/rest/people/canonical/@all

Wookie Widget Server

One of the goals was to render any kind of widget and not just OpenSocial. Since version 0.9-incubating we also bundle Apache Wookie to render W3C widgets. You can access the Wookie Widget Server on http://localhost:8080/wookie/. You can log in into its adminstration menu using "java" as username and password.

When you want to deploy the portal on your server, you can configure the host name for both the Shindig server and Wookie server.

Database

The demo setup uses an H2 database that is configured to store its database in /tmp (Windows users will find it in c:\tmp). You can look inside the database on http://localhost:11111 to see which tables were created by OpenJPA or modify the database contents. The web console locks the file that contains the database, so log out when you want to use the portal. For deployment on a server we have documented how to configure the database with MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle.

LDAP

Apache Rave supports multiple authentication sources to access the portal. In the demo portal we start up an embedded Apache Directory Studio (ApacheDS) to demonstrate LDAP authentication with Spring Security. When you log in with "johnldap" as username and password, the portal looks up the credentials in the embedded ApacheDS and uses the LDAP response to create a user profile in the portal. The embedded ApacheDS is meant for the demo, but you can configure Apache Rave to use the existing LDAP server within your own network.