This article provide document provides details about the Apache Geronimo installation and planning. Here you will find information about what are the prerequisite software for Geronimo, where to download Geronimo from and , how to customize the installation to use custom ports other than the defaults .In this document you will also find details about the installation and configuration of different topologies such as 2-tier with remote Web serverand how to start/stop Geronimo.

This article document is organized in the following sections:

Prerequisite software

Apache Geronimo v2.1 builds on J2SE 1.5 using Maven 2, get the appropriate JVM versions from the following sites.

• J2SE SDK (http://java.sun.com/)
• Apache Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) only needed if building from source.

Note: Ensure that after installing Java in your system the <java_home>/bin directory is added to the system PATH and also ensure that both variables JAVA_HOME and JRE_HOME are also defined.

Downloading Geronimo

Apache Geronimo v2.1 is a JEE5 Certified server, downloads are provided for both Windows and Unix (including Linux, Mac OS X) operating systems. In addition to the platform specific downloads, Geronimo is available in three main distributions which are the Java EE 5 Certified (Big-G), Little-G and Geronimo Framework. As suggested by the name, only the first one has full support of all the features and functions in the JEE 5 specification and has passed SUN's JEE5 Certification Test Suite (CTS).

Little-G distribution includes a Web container and a subset of other modules from the certified Geronimo distribution. This is not a Java EE 5 compliant server but it is probably more appealing to users that look for a smaller footprint with specific functionality. Both distributions, JEE 5 Certified and Little-G, are available with two different web containers ( Tomcat 6 and Jetty 6 ).

The third distribution, Geronimo Framework, offers just that, a stripped down framework for you to build up your own custom Geronimo server based on the available plugins. Unlike Little-G, this distribution does not include a web container, it only provides the bare minimum support for installing plugins. This is particularly practical since Geronimo v2.1 is built up entirely from plugins, see the Plugin infrastructure section for additional details.

The source code and binaries for Geronimo v2.1 can be found at the following URL
http://geronimo.apache.org/downloads.html

Building from source

From a command line console uncompress the source code (.zip or tar.gz) and change directory <geronimo_home>.
Type the following command to build Apache Geronimo:

mvn install

When you build from the source, by default, you build all the distributions described earlier. Detailed steps and requirements to build Geronimo from the source are covered in depth in the Building Geronimo with Maven section.

Installing Geronimo from binaries

Depending on the platform you plan to install and run Apache Geronimo download the appropriate installation image. Select the appropriate file compression format for your operating system (.zip, .tar.gz) by clicking directly on the link, download it and expand the binary to your hard drive in a new directory.

The installation of Apache Geronimo is as simple as uncompressing the .zip or .tar files. From a command line window change directory to <geronimo_home>/bin and start the server using the following command:

geronimo run

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• Installing prerequisite software includes topics on what you will need before using Geronimo distributions.
  
  
• Getting and installing Geronimo includes topics on where to download and how to install differenct Geronimo distributions.
  
  
• Initial configuration includes topics on general configurations you need to know before starting a Geronimo server.
  
  
• Starting and stopping the server includes topics on how to start and shutdown the server in different ways: graphic interface or command line interface.
  
  
• Running Geronimo includes topics on how to run the server in different situations or different platforms.