Installing MobileFirst Platform Server v7.1 on WAS ND - Step 12

APPLICATION CENTER

Okay, so now we have a working MFP Server, an Operational Analytics Server, all we need now iis an Application Center to be installed and setup.

Now, let's be clear, you do no always need to have an Application Center Server installed. It all depends on what you are doing and how you are doing it.

The Application Center is basically a Google Play or Apple Store of your very own. In the same way that you have a Google Play app installed on your Android device to access the Google Play Store, you will install an Application Center client app and that will connect to the Application Center Server. On that server you will publish the Mobile applications that you want to restrict your users to using.

You can add .apk, .ipa, etc ... apps to the Application Center console and can restrict which users can see / use them. For instance, if you have a certain set of testers who you want to control to test only a certain version of certain apps then this is a great way of doing it. You have loads of control in the Application Server settings, such as forcing the user to upgrade to the latest version of an app. Why let the testers carry on doing tests with a broken app, when you've just released a fixed version?

You can also add apps from the Google Play or Apple Stores too, but, you, the admin guy chose which ones to share and which ones to allow which users to use. This sounds all very limiting and restrictive, but it's a good thing in an Enterprise environment.

In order to have all this goodness, what do you need to install? Well, in the same way as the Operational Analytics Server, you would normally install the Application Center in it's own WAS ND environment. For here though, we're going to continue and install it into the same VMWare that we've been using.

Earlier on, when we were doing the MFP Server install, we created the Oracle database user / tables etc .. now is the time we'll hook into that.

. The first step we need to do is get the .ojdbc6.jar file copied to the server into the WAS ND cell folder location I created the / Worklight / oracle folder and dropped it in there as shown in the video:
Again, we previously setup the JDBC DataSource, if we had not done that already, we'd have to do it at this point, before we install the .ear file.

Then we need to install the .applicationcenter.ear file as a New Enterprise Application and configure it correctly, by changing the class loader info etc ...

Once we've configured the .ear file, we need to configure the Android SDK platform tools package. As you'll see in the video, everything we need is already available, we just need to copy a folder from the MFP Binaries installation to a different location within the WAS ND cluster and configure the .ear file to know the folder location.

At the end of this particular video I show the red error text that is sometimes shown if you are going too fast! Here I show that the WAS ND nodes are still still replicating and I am impatiently too quick to want to Start the .ear application . If you just wait a little bit, then becomes available to Start.

! We should now be good to go Let's open the / applicationcenterconsole and add a .apk file to the Application Center:

If we now installed the Mobile application onto a real or emulated device, set the configuration to point to this VMWare server, you would connect and show us the ACE! App. We could then select it, download it and install it.

The Application Center Mobile applications are all available in the MFP Binaries / ApplicationCenter subfolder. You can use them as-is, although I believe that the Apple version might need building in XCode first. I'm an Android guy, so I'm not too fussed about that :-)

So, there we have it. A full end-to-end installation of MFP v7.1, Operational Analytics and Application Center into a WAS ND environment.

It's not so scary now is it?

Due to installing everything into one VMWare, I've missed out loads of bits, like making sure that ports are open between servers, firewalls being open to allow communication between App Center mobile apps and the server, etc..etc ... but I have covered what I set out to cover, which is to remove the mystery surrounding installing MobileFirst Platform Server into a WAS ND environment.

Any queries about this article and the contents, feel free to contact me.

Disclaimer: The solution discussed herein is from my own personal experience as a developer using the MobileFirst platform and do not represent IBM's view nor IBM's interest in supporting this officially.

If you have general WAS/MFP etc... queries then StackOverFlow is your place to post them.