Installing

Overview
Quick Install
Operating System Requirements
Required Software
Copying To Tomcat
Starting Tomcat
Visiting The Website
Configuring the Application

First, you'll want to install the Survey Manager, which will allow you to create surveys and run the survey editor. Here's how to do that.

A beta version of a installer will be available soon -- however, if you are an experienced system administrators you may prefer these directions.

Overview

Survey Manager will run on a server using Apache Tomcat and MySQL. Both of these packages are free.

Quick Install Directions

These are the short directions, for experienced system administrators. Ignore these directions if you don't understand them and read the instructions below.

1. Install Apache Tomcat 5.0 (latest tested is 5.0.28, do not use 5.5).
2. Install MySQL 4.1 or newer. Create a new account in MySQL with root permissions to create new databases.
3. Download surveymanager.war and copy it into your webapps folder.
4. Visit the surveymanager website, and follow the one-page directions to finish the installation.

Operating System Requirements

You may use Windows, Mac OS X, or Red Hat Linux. If you have the knowledge and opportunity to use Linux, we recommend Linux as the operating system of choice for hosting websites and similar tasks. (In addition, our preliminary speed tests with several Java applications found that Linux ran Java the fastest).

Required Software

Before you can install the Survey Manager, you must install several programs. You'll need:

• Java, . Please make sure you have the correct version of Java installed before you move on and install Apache Tomcat. Make sure your system path is set to the latest version of Java JDK that you've just installed.
  If you're using Kaffe, see some notes on using Kaffe).
  If you're using Mac OS X, you don't need to install Java -- it's already included.
  
• MySQL, http://www.mysql.com/ [More help using MySQL]
  (in the future, other databases may be supported -- the source code can be fairly easily adapted to other databases, and formerly ran on Microsoft Access (but MS Access is slow and poor for real applications)).
• Apache Tomcat, or another  Java Servlet and JSP container.
  Apache Tomcat 5.0 is recommended, http://jakarta.apache.org/. Note that Apache Tomcat 5.5 does NOT work with this tool, and does not work with many other JSP packages, as of November 2004. Read more about installing Apache Tomcat, especially if you are using Mac OS X.

Follow the independent instructions for installation and configuration of these software packages before going to the next step.

From this point forward, mysql_install_path and tomcat_install_path will refer to the install locations of the respective software. If you are not using MySQL or Tomcat, you will need to determine the correct commands for your environment.

Copy Survey Manager to Tomcat

Next, download surveymanager.war.

Copy surveymanager.war into tomcat_install_path/webapps -- so, if you want to double-check that you got it right, you should have a folder named tomcat_install_path/webapps/surveymanager.war, and after running tomcat, you will have a folder named tomcat_install_path/webapps/surveymanager/ containing lots of files. If not, you may have copied the wrong thing or into the wrong place.

Starting and Stopping Tomcat

Next, start up Apache Tomcat. [How to start and stop Apache Tomact]

Visiting the Survey Manager page

Open up a web browser, and visit the webpage. Find out the domain name of your computer (if you don't know it, click here). In the address box, type "http://localhost:8080/ surveymanager", substituting your domain name for the word "localhost". You should see something that looks like this.

Before you proceed any further, you may want to configure MySQL, the database. You may want to change the default password for the "root" account. See the MySQL documentation on how to do this. If you're doing this for the first time, you may skip this step, but if you do so, your database will be insecure and possibly hacked into.

Configuring the Survey Manager for the first time

You now need to enter some configuration parameters.

1. "Email Address": Enter the email address for the administrator of the system. You will get error messages and other info at this email address. These will let you know when people have trouble using the survey tool, and if you have persistent problems, you may forward these to the survey developers for clarification and/or bug fixes. You might want to set up an email filter to put these messages into a separate email folder if you get a lot of these messages.
2. "MySQL UserID", "MySQL Password": Enter the UserID and Password you configured for MySQL. If you didn't configure anything for mysql, the username is "root" and the password is blank (which is insecure, and you probably want to change).
3. You may leave the rest as the default. Your hostname will probably be localhost, although you can run a MySQL server anywhere. If you want a log file of all the debugging information, you may enter a file name under "Debugging file path (optional)".
   

Submit the form, and the application will confirm the configuration information, or display error messages if a connection could not be made. Subsequently you should receive a confirmation that looks similar to this.

After the configuration completes, in most cases you'll have to restart Apache Tomcat. See above for more info.

Again, open http://localhost/surveymanager/ (or your server's domain name), and you should arrive at a login prompt. The default UserID is "admin" and the password is "admin". Change these immediately for your security.

The JSP Survey Manager is now installed!

Credits
Written by Saagar Patel, Aaron Powers, and Shirlene Lim. Last updated April, 2005.