Installing JIRA as a WAR

Installing JIRA as a WAR

Ah, the ironies are a plenty: the archive name (war), the fact that Atlassian‘s newest product is called Bonfire. Finally installed JIRA on my mini server last night and it was hell on earth. Decided to try to install the war. Now, I upgraded the mini to 16GBs of RAM in anticipation of having to run several tomcats, so I plead guilty to being a complete ape in deciding to instead attempt the war install. It was an unmitigated disaster. Death by a thousand cuts, pick your cliche, but the long and short of it was after a LOT of tinkering, Tomcat was not extracting the war file into the web apps directory, even though the server.xml param was telling it to, and JIRA was bombing out on an NPE. (This is where in my little kangaroo (pun intended) court, I'd be ready to start throwing down a sentence of a year or two on an Aleutian Island.) What was even funnier though, was I found this thread where the enraged blogger is being assuaged by a polite representative of Atlassian. It‘s like, hey dude, if you are going to be so polite, do us a favor and go at least put a bloody exception in the code! (The polite explanation is basically ‘well we just can‘t support that configuration.‘ Ok, perfect job for an exception.)

Eventually, I relented and installed the standalone version and that was fairly simple to setup. The usual crap: create a db, make a user, refresh your memory about GRANT ALL, then chown a bunch of dirs. Ah, the tonics that make a man a man… [as Revenge of the Nerds was testament to, nerds are in fact the underfoot version of everything they supposedly hate: macho, chest-pounding apes].

Anyway, the one task that remained was getting it setup for launchctl (OS X‘s way of doing daemons). There was actually a doc page in the Atlassian documentation (which is dogfood-based wiki), but it was pretty paltry pickings, not really ready to go. Definitely some shoemaker‘s son in the Atlassian Ecosystem (they are selling tools for documenting projects). The good thing is, they have a bunch of screencasts that are pretty decent. And, again, they seem to be cutting a very interesting, practical tack with regards to the fusion of Lean and lifecycle management (ticketing), so the tools still look good, but do not, under any circumstances, decide to do a war install of JIRA et al. I would probably agree to eat raw Jellyfish tentacles to avoid repeating that catastrophe….)

I did a tour a bit ago (thankfully brief) on a project where wikis were quite literally verboten, because, as the prior lead said, the code was the documentation. Oh, ok, let me go check with the code to see why we are putting resources in /var/empty or how ssh key handshaking is done in the build. (As you could imagine, the code was a completely undocumented pile of radioactive witlessness that was aping BDD by having a bunch of tests that say ‘ok, call x, now assert that x was called.‘)

Anyway, seriously everything anyone ever wanted to know about the failure of Java to deliver on the promise of a WORA platform that would support modularity, interchangeability, scalability beyond rewriting the code, is on exhibit in this episodic little tragedy. But it‘s abundantly clear that Java is just the latest scapegoat to be blamed for the failure to deliver real modularity at a platform level, and folks, this is not a case of seeing an engine on the track but having to wait for it to come into the station, there is literally no one out there working on it at all. Drug resistant TB is back in India but big pharma would rather work on the next penis pill. Likewise, in IT, the Age of Quixote is over and the current gen is all about slapping up the boards and getting out of town. These are two topics I want to drill more in on: what would real modularity look like and why in hell can‘t we get there in the Age of the Cloud? and what happens to a culture that never builds anything they have to live in for more than a year or so? Anyone who has tried to hire in the last decade knows the dominant genus that‘s out there is the hermit crab. Eventually, that makes the witlessness of the platform become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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