ANT - environment

If you've noticed, JDeveloper uses ANT for the purpose of deploying BPEL processes to the server.  Not only does ANT deploy the BPEL process, it also deploys the workflow forms and any decision services that might be included in your process.  Getting familiar with ANT is important if you want to deploy via command line or customize your deployment process.  As part of the test that I am doing on custom deployment of partner-links I have had the opportunity to experiment with ANT and discovered  a few "tricks" to get it to work in all your environments.

First, I found it necessary to set up my environment before I could use command-line ant.  Here is a list of things I needed (All my environments are Linux):

• ORACLE_HOME - I defined this as the root Oracle Application Server location.
• ANT_HOME - This defines the home where Apache Ant resides.
• JAVA_HOME - I defined this so that I would use the same version of JAVA that the Oracle Application Server uses.
• BPEL_HOME - The build.xml for your project will use this home.
• PATH - I added JAVA bin and ANT bin directories to the PATH statement.

This is what my environment script ended up looking like:

ORACLE_HOME=/d01/oracle/product/10.1.3.1/iAS; export ORACLE_HOME ANT_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME}/ant; export ANT_HOME JAVA_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME}/jdk; export JAVA_HOME BPEL_HOME=${ORACLE_HOME}/bpel; export BPEL_HOME PATH=${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${ANT_HOME}/bin:${PATH}; export PATH

 

Once you have your environment set up, you can do a few things to test.  Here's a short list of things I did to test if the env variables where what I wanted.

• Run "java -version" - You should get a response like this:

java version "1.5.0_06" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-b05) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-b05, mixed mode)

• run "ant -version" - You should get a response like this: Apache Ant version 1.6.2 compiled on March 19 2005
• run "echo $BPEL_HOME" to verify that you have this set correctly.

Lastly, you should go to the $BPEL_HOME/utilities directory and open the ant-orabpel.properties file and verify that all the values (especially admin.password) are set correctly.

Once you have done all of the above, you should be ready to see if your command line deployment of a bpel process is working correctly.