Using the Sample Servlets

The MorphAdorner web site offers simple online examples of a number of MorphAdorner facilities. These examples are written as Java servlets. The source code for these servlets is included in the MorphAdorner release materials. The servlet code appears in the src/edu/northwestern/at/servlets/ directory.

You can run these servlets on your own machine if you have more than a gigabyte of memory available (e.g., your machine has two gigabytes of memory).

1. Make sure you have installed recent working copies of Sun's Java Development Kit and Apache Ant on your system.

2. Open a command line window (on Windows) or a terminal window (on Unix).

3. Move to the directory to which you installed the MorphAdorner release.

4. Type the following command to build a servlet container to hold the MorphAdorner servlets.

   ant servlets

   When this command completes, the subdirectory jetty will contain a tiny web site consisting of a minimal version of the Jetty servlet server, the MorphAdorner code, and supporting libraries.

5. You may now run the servlets by executing the runservlets batch file (Windows) or script (Unix/MacOSX) in the main MorphAdorner release directory. Wait until you see a message like

   INFO: Started SelectChannelConnector@0.0.0.0:8200

   This may take several minutes on a slow machine.

6. Start a web browser and load the page:

   http://localhost:8200/

   You should see a page with links to each MorphAdorner servlet. Click on any one of the links to use the corresponding servlet.

7. To stop the Jetty server, press <ctrl>C in the command line window in which you started Jetty.

You can read more about the Jetty server at http://www.mortbay.org/jetty/.

If you are already running another program which uses TCP port 8200, you can either stop that other program or use a different TCP port for the MorphAdorner servlets. To do that, edit the runservlets.bat or runservlets script file in the main MorphAdorner directory and change 8200 to an unused TCP port on your machine.

If you encounter any "out of memory" errors, you can raise the memory size allocated to the jetty server from 900k to, say, 1 gigabyte. To do that, edit the runservlets.bat or runservlets script file in the main MorphAdorner directory and change 900k to 1g.

All of the servlets extend the base class BaseAdornerServlet. Each servlet generates plain HTML output. There are no template libraries, template files, or JSP files used. All input uses plain HTML forms. All output is plain HTML. The cascading style sheet mstyle.css found in jetty/webapps/styles/mstyle.css sets the font and margins for the servlet output. You can modify that file to add any other kind of styling you prefer.