JBoss EAP 6.1 (AS 7.2) using WebSocket alpha extension + jQuery + websockets

Requirements: JBoss AS 7.1.2 or later + JBoss Native connectors enabled + Maven + WebSocket-supporting browser such as Chrome

Tested with

• Windows 7 64-bit, JBoss EAP 6.1.Alpha, Oracle JDK 7
• Centos 6.5 64-bit, JBoss EAP 6.1, Oracle JDK 7, running on VirtualBox

There are two ways to run this demo, either set up JBoss yourself, deploy there and use your regular browser (Chrome or Firefox) or use Vagrant script to set up JBoss environment for you in a VirtualBox box and deploy there. First one is recommended, but if you're having difficulties to set it up you can try the automated script way.

Configuring your JBoss instance yourself

If you go with setting up JBoss yourself, often the only change needed to vanilla JBoss configuration is that APR (Apache Portable Runtime) needs to be enabled. It should be enabled with changing:

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:web:1.1"
          default-virtual-server="default-host" native="false">

to:

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:web:1.1"
          default-virtual-server="default-host" native="true">

in standalone.xml / domain.xml

That should be it, as the native connectors should be packaged with the installation out of the box. After that you can start your JBoss, issue mvn clean package jboss-as:deploy -Djboss-as.username=YOURUSERNAME -Djboss-as.password=YOURPASS, open your browser and navigate to http://localhost:8080/websocket-web-app/

If on startup you get an error like this:

21:27:30,434 INFO  [org.apache.catalina.core] (MSC service thread 1-10) JBWEB001065: The native library which allows optimal
performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path

check for the folder "org/jboss/as/web/main/lib" within your JBoss modules folder. It should list your current architecture as a subfolder, containing native connectors for your platform. If lib folder is missing - it is missing at least if you build your JBoss server yourself - you need to retrieve and instal native connectors as well.

Also, for some environments, such as ARM architecture, native connectors are not available OOB.

If you need to install native connectors yourself, you should first try one of the binaries provided for download and if that is not an option or doesn't work, compile them from source code. To compile, download sources from http://www.jboss.org/jbossweb/downloads.html -> JBoss Web Native Connectors -> source tarball, and follow the compiling and installing steps given here: https://community.jboss.org/wiki/JbosswebBuildNative.

It's been reported in issue #6 that native libraries need to be installed separately on OSX as well.

Using Vagrant script to create a VM for you and run it there

Requirements for this:

• Vagrant installed
• VirtualBox installed
• Vagrant-omnibus plugin for Vagrant (Installing: vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus)
• Support for 64-bit VMs (often means 64-bit host OS + virtualization support turned on from BIOS)
• 500MB memory to spare to throw to VM

Recommended pre-step:

• download JBoss EAP 6.1 and save the downloaded jboss-eap-6.1.0.zip to the same folder as this file (has to be exactly that file!) Required steps:
• run vagrant up (will take some time, 30+ minutes)
• run mvn clean package jboss-as:deploy -Djboss-as.username=admin -Djboss-as.password=adminpass1!
• Switch to VM window
• Login with vagrant/vagrant (the black screen you see is just a screen saver, it'll go away when you type)
• Start graphical window system with startx
• Start firefox with firefox icon on the top of the screen (if you don't have a mouse cursor, restart the VM. Machine -> Reset.)
• Navigate to http://localhost:8080/websocket-web-app/

You don't have to download JBoss EAP yourself, in which case the script will download the source codes and build the EAP for you. This is slow though, it takes about an hour on my machine. The reason the script doesn't just download the binary is JBoss EAP licensing. However, building it from source code should be ok. It will only build it once, after which it leaves the built .zip file in this folder from where it can be used on subsequent VM creations if needed.

Reason for using a browser within VM is that VirtualBox seems to have issues with exposing WebSockets outside VM. Regular HTTP traffic works just fine.