Laszlo on a commercial webhost?

[benrosen]

Hi

I have a site at a commercial webhosting system (http://www.digitalspace.net). They let me run PHP, Perl, JSPs, and so on. I have a command line prompt and I can run java 1.4 from it. I have a mysql instance I can use. I expect they might let me install an entire web-app (e.g. a WAR file).

But they certainly aren't going to let me reboot the Tomcat instance, or muck with what's on what port, or modify the server.xml file.

Is there any way to use Laszlo in such an environment?

If not, couldn't there be in the future? Could there be some way to run a "Laszlo lite" for people using commercial webhosts with no root access or webserver admin rights? Could one, for instance, compile the XML stuff on one's local machine and upload the resulting flash files to webhost, and let them reference JSP web services, etc.? Would doing this lose any features?

Apologies if this is already covered somewhere.

Ben

[bloch]

Grab the lps-2.2 core distro which includes only the lps-2.2 webapp. You can deploy that under most servlet containers supporting servlet spec 2.3 running under java 1.4.2.

Depending on the container, there may be jar conflicts that woudl require tweaks to the containers settings.

See the installation instructions
http://www.laszlosystems.com/developers/learn/documentation/installation/


-Eric

[antun]

I expect they might let me install an entire web-app (e.g. a WAR file).

But they certainly aren't going to let me reboot the Tomcat instance, or muck with what's on what port, or modify the server.xml file.

I had difficulties with shared hosting environments - like you said there's many restrictions on what you can and can't do.

There is such a thing as virtual private server hosting, which feels just like having your own server (root access) but it's really shared. It costs a little more than typical shared hosting plans, but less than renting a physical server. I was able to install LPS successfully on a VPS, but did get a few out-of-memory errors.

-Antun

[benrosen]

It seems they won't let me have more than one web app at my webhost.

But looking over your installation instructions, if I understand correctly, it seems like the "lps-LPS 2.2" web application (as in "http://localhost:8080/lps-LPS%202.2/examples/hello.lzx") is really only needed for development of LZX applications. If I install that application on my PC, and create .lzx files *there*, and then I merge the LPS "lib" and "lps" directories and "web.xml" file into my designated webapp's WEB-INF, then I should be able to serve the .lzx files through Laszlo, right?

So then I could use it as a deployment platform, but not as a development platform? Is this worth trying?

thanks

Ben

[bloch]

Yes that *should* work.. as long as you don't have jar (CLASSPATH) conflicts in the webapp.

-Eric

[bjayaram]

I am also interested in this configuration for development and deployment. Ben, could you please post some feedback on whether you were able to do what you wanted to do?

Thanks,
Jayaram