On Service Management...

It's hard to believe that blaugust is drawing to a close... where did the summer go? Given that I have a few more blog entries left before I hit my target for blaugustFEST, I'll be spending some time this week covering lesser known aspects of Embarcadero's ER/Studio Enterprise Portal product (launched last week). While somewhat product-specific, I hope that this information will also be of general interest to those of you who may be using Tomcat as an application server or Pentaho as a business intelligence platform...

The Enterprise Portal makes use of Apache Tomcat as its application server, and installs it as a service in Windows. One of the things I've found, while testing and using the portal, is that I often want to know the current status of this service and/or do things like shut it down and start it back up again. Fortunately, Tomcat provides a service management utility to do this and other maintenance tasks related to the service. To launch it, type (something similar to) the following from a command prompt (or in the Run dialog available from the Start > Run... menu item):

"C:\Program Files\Embarcadero\ERStudioEnterprisePortal1.0\tomcat\bin\tomcat5w.exe" //MS//Tomcat5ERSPortal

After doing this, an icon will appear in the system tray (on the right-hand side of the task bar). If you double-click the icon, a window will open which allows you to start/stop/restart the service, change the way it logs on to Windows, set the logging behavior, configure the application server's Java virtual machine, among other things.