CroftSoft / Library / Tutorials

Program D Setup on JBoss

David Wallace Croft

2006 Dec 20 Wed

These are my notes on setting up a Program D chatbot on a JBoss 4 application server. These instructions use version 4.7 of Program D, which has not been released yet and is still under development. For an example of working software, please see the CroftSoft Client.

Modifying the Build

Checkout the source code for Program D from the CVS repository. The main Ant build file is "build.xml" in the root directory. Run target "war" of the Ant build. If it fails to compile, you might need to exclude a couple of source files from the javac command in target "compile" since they are still under development.

<target name="compile" ...>
  <javac ...>
    <exclude name="org/aitools/programd/graph/DBGraphmapper.java"/>
    <exclude name="org/aitools/programd/graph/DBNodemapper.java"/>
    ...
  </javac>
</target>

Building and Installing the Distribution

Run the Ant build target "clean" first and then "war-distribs". This will create a "programd-4.7-war.zip" file in the "distrib" directory. Upload the zip file to a temporary directory on your server and unzip it. It will create a "ProgramD" directory containing a WAR file and two subdirectories, "conf" and "resources". Create a "/var/programd" directory on your server and move the "conf" and "resources" subdirectories into it. Move the WAR file into your JBoss deploy directory. Remove the files in the temporary directory.

Installing the AIML

Create an "aiml" subdirectory in the /var/programd directory on the server. Download the Annotated ALICE AIML files from the Program D website and upload them to the new "aiml" subdirectory on the server. Unzip the AIML files to create an "aaa" subdirectory under "aiml". Delete the AIML archive file that you just unzipped. Edit the bots configuration file to use the new AIML files by unremarking the learn command for the "aaa" directory. Note that you might need to change "AAA" to "aaa".

Pruning the AIML

The ALICE AI Foundation has an article describing the Annotated ALICE AIML files. After reading the article, you might decide to delete some of the AIML files that you just installed. Here is a list of the ones that I delete.

cd /var/programd/aiml/aaa
rm AI.aiml
rm Alice.aiml
rm Drugs.aiml
rm Philosophy.aiml
rm Politics.aiml
rm Religion.aiml
rm Sex.aiml
rm Sports.aiml
rm Wallace.aiml

Setting the Properties

The bottom of the article describing the Annotated ALICE AIML files also describes bot properties used by those files and provides example values. Edit the example properties file that comes with Program D to provide values for your bot.

Confirming Installation

Test the web-based interface at this URL:

Test the servlet at this URL:

If the the GetBotResponse servlet does not work but the web interface does, you might need to rebuild the WAR file to ensure that class is included. If you are going to use the web interface instead of the servlet, you do not need the servlet. If you are going to install CroftSoft Client for Program D, you will need the servlet.

Changing the Logging Configuration

Chat with the chatbot and confirm that it is logging the conversation to this file:

If you want to change the logging configuration, you do not modify the log4j.xml file in the /var/programd/conf directory. This file is not used. Instead, the log4j.xml file included in the WEB-INF/classes directory of the programd.war file is read upon application initialization. If you want to change this file, you will need to do so before you build the WAR file.

I have seen a webpage describing how an application can override the default initialization to load a logging configuration log4j.xml from a different path other than the root of the classpath. If implemented in Program D in the future, this might permit the log4j.xml file in the /var/programd/conf file to be used.

Fixing Logging

You will see the following in the JBoss server.log:

ERROR [STDERR] log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.

This is because JBoss gets confused about whether to use the Log4j classes deployed with programd.war or the ones that come with JBoss. Tomcat probably does not have this problem. See Log4j Configuration Help at apache.org for more on this.

You can probably just ignore this error and skip the rest of this section.

I tried fixing this by adding a jboss-web.xml file like the following to the WEB-INF directory as suggested in the jboss.org webpage Class Loading Configuration. This did not work for me, however, although I am not sure why.

<jboss-web>
  <class-loading java2ClassLoadingCompliance="false">
    <loader-repository>
      org.apache.log4j:loader=programd.war
      <loader-repository-config>java2ParentDelegation=false</loader-repository-config>
    </loader-repository>
  </class-loading>
</jboss-web>

As an alternative to including a jboss-web.xml file, you might need to instead change the following line in target "war" of the Ant build to exclude the Log4j classes deployed with the application:

<lib dir="${webapp.lib.dir}"/>

<lib dir="${webapp.lib.dir}">
  <exclude name="log4j*.jar"/>
</lib>

Now the JBoss Log4j classes are being used instead. Because of this, you must configure the JBoss master log4j.xml file as the log4j.xml file in programd.war WEB-INF/classes directory is no longer read. The JBoss master log4j.xml file is in this directory:

Add the following to the JBoss master log4j.xml file to enable basic logging:

<appender name="programd_activitylog"
  class="org.apache.log4j.RollingFileAppender">
  <param name="File" value="/var/log/programd/activity.log" />
  <param name="MaxFileSize" value="10MB" />
  <param name="MaxBackupIndex" value="10" />
  <layout class="org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout">
    <param name="ConversionPattern" value="[%d{ISO8601}] %p: %m%n" />
  </layout>
</appender>

<logger name="programd">
  <level value="debug"/>
  <appender-ref ref="programd_activitylog" />
</logger>

Logging to a Database

Setting up chat logging to a database on JBoss is not easy as it requires that you add some Program D classes to the JBoss main library if you are going to use the JBoss master log4j.xml file. It might work if you use the log4j.xml file in WEB-INF/classes but I have not tried it yet.

Fixing the Manifest

I was getting some warnings in the JBoss server.log file about the programd.war manifest referring to JAR files JBoss could not locate. To fix this, I changed the "Classpath:" entry in the manifest file to an empty string. I think you can simply ignore the warnings instead of changing the manifest file.

Bot Configuration

Edit this file:

Database Configuration

Change the database password in this file:
/var/programd/conf/core.xml

To connect to the database:

To add a user to the database:

To confirm the entry:

To add a predicate to the database:

To exit the database: