Revision as of 23:24, July 13, 2010

Setting Up the Protege 4 Server Development Environment

Install From Svn and Server Startup

First checkout the development tree

     svn checkout http://smi-protege.stanford.edu/repos/protege/protege4/misc/society/protege.server

If you are using eclipse this will become your eclipse project later.

Some of the following directions will seem a little strange because at the moment the server is started by starting the junits. This will be fixed presently. As a consequence of this, before you run the ant targets you will need to go into org.protege.owl.server.junit, copy the junit.properties.template to junit.properties and configure settings that work with your database. All that needs to be set up is the database url, the user name and the password:

     db.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost/protege4
     db.user=protege
     db.password=troglodyte

MySQL and PostGreSQL databases should work.

Now there are a couple of ant tasks that are available:

• install installs the Protege client and server in the subdirectory build/Protege.
• run.server builds and runs the server. As part of this target the install target is also built.
• debug.server builds and runs the server with debugging turned on at port 8500.
• run.database.manager runs the database manager which will allow one to copy owl ontologies into the database. Ontologies in the database will automatically become available on the server
• run.client builds and runs the client. As part of this target the install target is also built.
• debug.client builds and runs the client with debugging turned on at port 8501

After the install step, a copy of the client and the server is put in the directory build/Protege. When the server is running, this client can be used to connect to the server and edit the shared ontologies.

Running the Protege Client

There are three ways of starting the client:

1. ant run.client
2. after an ant install go to the build/Protege directory and run one of the start scripts.
3. run the client using an ide (recommended for debugging).

The following steps will then load an ontology from the server:

1. After starting the client, click on Connect to Server
2. In the text field type "localhost:8080" and click on connect.
3. After it connects select an ontology (e.g. pizza)
4. Click on the "Open in Protege" button.

If you run a couple of clients you can experiment with propagating changes. Also the server menu has some items that will allow you to propagate changes manually.

Setting up Eclipse

To set up eclipse,

1. unzip the ide-eclipse.zip file.
2. start eclipse using protege.server as the workspace.
3. import the projects (File -> Import -> General -> Existing Projects Into Workspace).

This eclipse workspace will come with a couple of runnables:

• Client starts the Protege OWL Client.
• Server not working yet for some reason.
• ConnectToAntServer connects to the "ant debug.server" script for debugging.