Modifying the webapp¶

Context¶

You want to change something in the interactive part of the application: the JSPs (Java Server Pages) that present the application in the browser -- or the servlets that process requests and hand off to the MATLAB layer -- and deploy the changed version.

You do not want to change any of the MATLAB code (see Modifying the MATLAB if you do).

You will need¶

• A computer with the MATLAB Compiler Runtime (MCR) installed.
  • This computer does not need a MATLAB licence.
  • The computer must be the same kind (platform, architecture etc) as the one the web app will eventually be served from. It may be simplest if it is the same machine.
  • It does not need to be the same kind of machine as the one with the licensed version of MATLAB used to compile the isvr.jar file (see Modifying the MATLAB).
  • The MATLAB Compiler Runtime must be of the same version as the MATLAB release that was used to compile the isvr.jar file (see Modifying the MATLAB).
• The Java development kit (JDK) of whichever version your MATLAB runtime expects. Current MATLAB seems to call for Java 7.
• The servlet-api.jar file from your web application server.

The most likely "production" setup is to have a workstation or server with a licensed copy of MATLAB on it, and to use that for Modifying the MATLAB; and then to have a separate, different machine (such as a Linux server) without MATLAB installed but with the MCR, which is used for both building and serving the web app.

What to change; limitations¶

The Java Server Pages files are found in WebContent/*.jsp. The default page is index.jsp. These files mix up HTML and Java segments in order to render the pages that are sent to the browser. They usually contain presentation code and forms and they may call out to other Java code for "real" work.

The servlets are found in src/*.java. A servlet is a Java class which accepts an HTTP request and generates some response, typically not a full HTML page (that's what the JSPs are used for).

In this application, currently, the JSPs generate the pages and the servlets are used to generate individual audio files for embedding into the pages.

The servlet code can call MATLAB functions, by building the special MWStructArray class (from com.mathworks.toolbox.javabuilder package) which contains a structure of MATLAB types and passing it to a method corresponding to the desired MATLAB function. That method (e.g. simulateBinauralSignals) is found in a Java class that was generated by the MATLAB compiler, in this case HumanEcho inside isvr.jar.

How to rebuild¶

If you have previously changed the MATLAB code (see Modifying the MATLAB), make sure you have rebuilt it and copied the isvr.jar to WebContent/WEB-INF/lib on the present machine.

Copy the servlet-api.jar from your application server (e.g. Tomcat) installation into the main directory of the web app project.

Copy the javabuilder.jar from the MATLAB Compiler Runtime distribution into the WebContent/WEB-INF/lib directory.

In the main directory of the web app project, use the build Ant file:

$ ant -f build.xml

(This is the default filename for Ant, so you could just run ant without any arguments.)

This should generate a file called echoapp.war. That is the complete web application file ready to deploy to Tomcat or equivalent application server.