Now use Apache on Windows with Server Advanced - Tutorial

[FMWebschool]

Hi Everyone :

Good News for Windows users that want to use FileMaker Server Advanced, Apache and Windows.

While developing our new product "BlackBelt"

http://fmwebschool.com/frm/index.php?topic=836.0 (allows you to run CDML on FileMaker 7-8.5) we needed to test in multiple server environments. We discovered by simply adding a line of code to the Apache httpd file and a couple lines of code to a couple other files we were able to run FMSA on Windows.

Up until now, only IIS was the supported server to run the FileMaker Server Advanced Web Publishing Engine. However, Apache is a very popular web server for both Windows and Mac platforms and includes a lot of very interesting modules such as mod_rewrite - which are great to use with many sites to make search engine friendly URLs. Previously using Apache and FileMaker on Windows required running IIS for the web publishing engine and Apache as a separate process - with the help of this tutorial, you can eliminate IIS from your system and use only Apache!

http://www.fmwebschool.com/resources/webfiles.zip

http://www.fmwebschool.com/resources/WPE_Apache.pdf

To download WAMP for Windows, navigate to http://wampsever.com/en

In Kindness

Stephen K Knight

http://www.fmwebschool.com

800.353.7950 / 386.453.5843

FMWebschool, we bring the web to life

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[Steven H. Blackwell]

[color:red]This may or may not work consistently. But it is not supported by or certified by FileMaker, Inc. I would therefore exercise a great deal of caution when doing this.

Steven

[FMWebschool]

Hi Steven,

Would you care to substantiate your claim, by at least providing some evidence?

The method that we have used to achieve this feat is a replication of the Mac OS install of FMSA for Apache, the tutorial even mentions modifying the Apache specific files that are included in the Windows copy of FMSA. Therefore implying that "it may not work" is almost equalent to saying that FMSA might not always work on the Mac.

The main difference between our method and the official FileMaker Jakarta connector is that FileMaker compiled their own, renaming the functions from JkFunctionName to JkFMFunctionName. You might not be familiar with the specific server technology involved in this instance - but basically mod_jk or mod_jk_fm (the official Mac only module) is a redirector of server requests to an existing Jakarta server. Therefore the key to this is the workers.properties file which redirects the requests coming into Apache (and on IIS there is an equivalent redirect) to the Web Publishing Engine processes which are constantly listening on ports in the range of 16010 - 16020. Simply take a look at the workers.properties for details.

Therefore unless you are implying that FileMaker Inc have changed the mod_jk module significantly, adding extra redirection capabilities (which would be unlikely since it is more work to maintain and is generally not required) - then any recent mod_jk should be able to redirect the requests from any supported servers to the correct WPE processes running in the 16010-16020 port ranges (which our installation has not modified at all).

I apologize for the lengthy explanation. but I truly hope it will provide clear explanation of exactly what is being done behind the scenes in this tutorial. With all this in mind, could you explain how this could be harmful or dangerous to Apache users on Windows systems?

In Kindness

Stephen Knight

[Steven H. Blackwell]

After I said the following:

This may or may not work consistently. But it is not supported by or certified by FileMaker, Inc. I would therefore exercise a great deal of caution when doing this.

Stephen Knight asked me to substantiate it.

I'm not sure what "claim" it is that you want substantiated, but the point I was making is that while this may work, it is not a supported configuration, and therefore caution should be used when deploying it. For example, instability might occur when attempting to pair the WPE with an unsupported Web Server.

FMI extensively tested the supported configurations through several levels of SQA before the products were released. And they decided to support IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003, IIS 5 on Windows 200 Server, and Apache 1.3 on OS X Server.

Until such future time or such future release that some other configuration is supported, I would, as I said, exercise caution using anything else. Additionally, if a user calls FMI Tech Support, these non-supported configurations will likely result in no Tech Support assistance.

Steven