How to build ORYX editor in Ubuntu

Introduction

Oryx editor is a web based BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) editor. Oryx is a project of the Business Process Technology research group at the Hasso Plattner Institute of IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam, Germany. The research group is led by Professor Mathias Weske, as is the Oryx project.
This blog is focused on building Oryx from the source in Ubuntu.

RequirementsJ2SE 5 Java Runtime Environment or higher
SubVersionApache Tomcat server (5.5 or higher)
Apache Ant 1.6 or higher
Checkout the sourceFirst you have to check out the source from the SubVersion repository
svn checkout http://oryx-editor.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ oryx-editor-read-only

After checking out the source you have to build the source using Ant. But before that you need to configure the database server which used to store the Oryx business process models. Here I have described on configuring the PostgreSQL database server.

Configure the PostgreSQL database 1.Install PostgreSQL sudo apt-get install postgresql-8.3 postgresql-plpython-8.3

2.Then we have to configure the database such that it does not require passwords for local tcp connections. Before that if the database server is started you have to stop it using the following command.

/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 stop

3.For that client authentication configurations for the database have to be changed. Traditionally these configurations are stored in pg_hba.conf file located at /etc/postgresql/8.3/main.

Modify the configurations as follows.

# Database administrative login by UNIX sockets
local all postgres ident sameuser

# TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 md5

4.Then start the database using the following command
/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 start

5.Now using the following commands you have to create a user called “poem” without password.
su postgres
createuser --superuser --echo poem

Now PostgreSQL database configuration process is completed such that there is user called “poem” which can connect to the database without passwords and database server trusts all the tcp local connections. Now all the requirements for the building process are completed.

Building the source

Before building the source you need to modify the build.properties configuration file located at the root of Oryx source. You need to change “deploymentdir” in build.properties to the full path to the tomcat deployment directory.

eg. deploymentdir = /opt/installations/tomcat1/apache-tomcat-6.0.18/webapps

If you go into the root of Oryx source directory you may see a dependency graph (build-dependencies.png) which depicts on how the Ant targets are inter-dependent.

Now using the following command the Oryx source can be build.
ant rebuild-all
Like wise using the ant targets you can compile, clean, build, deploy Oryx.

As well you have to create the database which stores the Oryx business process models using the following commands.
/etc/init.d/postgresql-8.3 start
ant create-db
In this case if you have configured the PostgreSQL database server correctly, no password will be asked during the database creation and the database will be created without an error.

Then to deploy the Oryx editor use the following commands.
ant deploy-all
Now if you go in to the tomcat deployment directory you may see two WAR distributions called backend.war and oryx.war. Extract both of them. Now by starting the tomcat engine you can deploy the Oryx editor.

Finally you can open the Oryx model repository in Firefox3.
http://localhost:8080/backend/poem/repository