Planning Visualization Platform client installations
Before installing Visualization Platform client, you must prepare the operating system and network environments to ensure that you have all the necessary software and configuration resources in place. This section describes how to prepare these environments before starting the Visualization Platform client installation process and discusses deployment concerns that may affect your Visualization Platform client installation and how you wish to deploy reports to the web.
Setting up Visualization Platform client
You can install Visualization Platform client in several ways:
*As a separate web application packaged in a WAR or EAR
This method employs a third-party web or application server that manages the network traffic to the iHub Visualization Platform client application. An Visualization Platform client WAR or EAR can use native load balancing for iHub clusters, redundancy to support constant report services over the web, and iHub security measures in addition to third party load balancing and security measures.
*As a windows service
This method uses the iHub installer to install Visualization Platform client as a windows service with an embedded web server to handle network traffic. The windows service installation can integrate with iHub security and load balancing, but does not employ a third-party web or application server, so requires different configuration procedures than a WAR or EAR deployment.
*Automatically on the same host with iHub
This method provides reports locally on each iHub machine. For more information about installing iHub, see Installing Actuate BIRT iHub on Linux or Installing Actuate BIRT iHub on Windows.
For enterprise architectures, installing Visualization Platform client on several web servers is recommended.
To deploy a report to the web, you need:
*A Visualization Platform client installation.
*An application server or JSP or servlet engine such as Actuate embedded servlet engine or IBM WebSphere.
*One or more Actuate designer tools and Actuate BIRT iHub System with iHub Visualization Platform client configuration.
*Actuate BIRT iHub administrator privileges.
*Permission to read, write, and modify operating system directories as necessary. For example, the directory Java uses to hold temporary files is defined by the java.io.tmpdir property and is by default the value of the TMP system variable in the Windows environment and /var/tmp in the UNIX and Linux environments. Read and write permission must be provided to the application server running Visualization Platform client for this directory.