Installation: Instructions

1. Unarchive Morphis

Morphis comes in either a Unix gzip tar, or a Windows zip archive. You must first unarchive Morphis into a directory which we'll call the Morphis home directory. This home directory will need to be entered in the morphis.properties file below.

2. Ensure morphis.properties can be found

Morphis uses the morphis.properties file to initialize. If this file cannot be located, the Morphis home directory cannot be determined and Morphis will not operate. Morphis uses a few different ways to locate the file:

• System Property: you may specify the location of the file by setting the org.morphis.properties system property. Usually you can do this by setting the -D parameter of the java application. You may need to edit you application's startup scripts, or configuration files to add this property.
  
  
• Classpath: the morphis.properties file may be inside the application's Java CLASSPATH. It may also be in the application server's CLASSPATH as defined by your application server's configuration.
  
  
• Java start directory: Morphis will look in the working directory in which Java was started. This is the same as the user.dir System property.

3. Set your home directory in the morphis.properties file

The morphis-home environment variable needs to be set the morphis.properties file to the directory in which morphis was unarchived in step 1. For Windows, don't forget to escape your backslashes as in: c:\\morphis.

4. Add Jars to CLASSPATH

The following Jar files must be added to the application server's CLASSPATH.

• morphis.jar - Contains the core Morphis classes
• samples.jar - Contains Morphis sample applications (optional)
• xalan.jar - Contains Apache's XSLT processor
• xerces.jar - Contains Xerces XML processor
• bsf.jar - IBM's Bean Scripting Framework used for dynamic XSLT stylesheets
• jakarta-regexp-1.1.jar - Apache's regular expression classes
• Tidy.jar - JTidy a HTML syntax checker and pretty printer (Note: this jar should appear after xalan and xerces jars)

The easiest way to do this is to put them into the WEB-INF/lib directory. However, some application servers (like Apache's Tomcat) may have conflicting classes in the CLASSPATH. In these instances you're required to alter the application server's classpath directly. In the case of Tomcat, you will need to add these classes to the tomcat.bat or tomcat.sh file so they appear first in the CLASSPATH.

5. Ensure your application server knows about the Morphis web.xml file

Your application server will need to know in what instances to execute Morphis. The web.xml file located in the config directory of your Morphis installation contains these rules. This file states that the Morphis DispatchServlet will be invoked whenever URL's beginning with /morphis are found. The best place for this file is in your webapps WEB-INF directory.

You may need to restart your web and application servers at this point.

6. Test some Morphis samples

Morphis has a few samples that demonstrate its features. Source to the samples is located in the samples directory of your Morphis installation. The dispatch rules are located in the config/dispatch.xml file.

• http://yourserver/morphis/slashdot/index
  Illustrates how content can be obtained from other application servers. In this case, the articles at Slashdot.org are fetched, translated into Morphis WAX, and then translated into a format suitable for your browser. Try this with a regular web browser, with your WAP emulator, your wireless web phone, or your AvantGo device.
  
  
• http://yourserver/morphis/filelisting
  Show how Java code can be called from an XSLT stylesheet, and converted into Morphis WAX. The directory contents of the application server's home directory are listed so any device can read it.
  
  
• http://yourserver/morphis/reverse
  Given a URL, this sample will obtain the contents of the web site, and reverse the words. This demonstrates how Morphis can be used as a content filter.
  
  
• http://yourserver/morphis/quotes
  This sample shows how different views of an XML file can be displayed using XSLT, and converted into Morphis WAX.