IBM G210-1784-00 Chapter Learning Management System Installation Overview, Packaging overview

Chapter 3

Learning Management System Installation Overview

The following information provides an outline of the Learning Management System installation process.

Packaging overview

The functional components of the Learning Management System product are J2EE™ web applications. J2EE provides the packaging for these components as a standard.

The important units of the Learning Management System packaging as J2EE applications are

•.war (web application archive) files

•.ear (enterprise application archive) files

Both of these package types are zip-format archives containing standardized metadata. These files are identified by the .war and .ear filename extensions, respectively.

Of these two, the .war file is the lower level entity. An .ear file may contain multiple .wars, each with its own URL context and the needed information to resolve bindings implied by the .war file. An important binding involves security. A .war file may refer to a security-role that it uses, but the .ear file has the information to bind that role to a specific subject or user group.

The Learning Management System packages its two functional servers as separate .ear files. .Ear files can contain resource references and environment entries. These are items that the application has identified as required services or settings. An example resource reference would be a reference to a JDBC™ connection, which the Learning Management System uses to access the relational database.

When an .ear file that contains resource references or environment entries is deployed on a J2EE application server (for example, a WAS server), the application server generally presents a means where you can resolve those references or environment values. With a WAS server this is done via the Administration Console user interface. By representing the Learning Management System setup requirements as either resource references or environment entries, you can the use the WebSphere Application Server deployment process to gather the needed install-time settings.

Some words about the Learning Management System settings & configuration information

Most Learning Management System settings are stored in either of two places:

•XML-format text files located in the web-application WEB-INF/classes directory. The relevant file for the Learning Management System Server is named settings.xml, and the corresponding file for the Delivery Server is named ds-settings.xml. When the servers first start, they read settings from these files.

•The Learning Management System application database. After the servers read settings from the XML files, they read additional settings from the database. When a setting is specified in both the database and the XML files, the one in the database overrides the setting specified in the XML file.

When you specify application settings using the Learning Management System Installer or, subsequently, the Learning Management System user interface, those settings are stored in the application database. You can change settings that you specified with the Learning Management System Installer by using the Learning Management System Updater, a utility that resides in the /update directory. The Updater presents you with the necessary screens, pre-populated with your original settings data. After you have made the necessary settings changes, the

Chapter 3: LMS Installation Overview 5