Mamp Pro CatSlapper

I love GUI’s. There I said it. It makes sense since I make them day in day out. It frustrates me when there are still things in this day and age that I have to do in the Terminal. For those who aren’t familiar or use PC’s. The terminal is a “text input application” that by typing certain magical words or letters you can make your mac do almost anything.

It’s a TUI (text user interface) and I don’t like it. Often the terminal is used for the more “geeky” side of what I do at work (anyone not in the “biz” would be amazed that I would class anything I do as not geeky). So things like setting up web servers or configuring web servers, or installing anything server based (do you see a pattern).

I’m always on the hunt for new UI based versions of popular terminal based activities (much to the amusement of Rick “the Vi Master”).

Two new additions to my GUI arsenal.

Firstly is the awesome MAMP and it’s accompanying MAMP Pro. MAMP stands for Mac Apache MySql and PHP, it’s a sandboxed bundle of those so you can have a web server up and running in the matter of a few clicks. MAMP Pro brings to the part a smashing UI that allows you to manager and master the server without ever touching the terminal. I especially love it for it’s UI enabled “hosts” management area. Managing server hosts in apache as a task that used to not only involve the terminal but also the manual editing of XML properties files, which is second on my list of things humans should never do (don’t ask about the first).

To add to the complexity, at work we use not only Apache, PHP, MySql environments for developing, but we also use Tomcat for Java and JSP development. Until the other day I was in terminal and xml editing purgatory. Until I discovered CatSlapper (a name that makes Tom and Eric giggle uncontrollably).

CatSlapper is to Tomcat what MAMP Pro is to Apache. In fact it almost does exactly the same things. They even cost about the same $20 each or there abouts, which is well worth it by the way. My only bug bear with it is that the documentation is totally lacking. That said I was able to install run a Tomcat server in less than 3 minutes, and get various webapplications deployed (after some banging of head on desk) in about 15 minutes. In case others can benefit from my early frustrations here is my quick 101 crib sheet.

Install Tomcat anywhere you please

If it usual when installing Tomcat to install it in someplace like the /usr/local directory. If that doesn’t sound familiar, don’t worry, it’s hidden. I personally have no idea why it’s the norm to install it there, I’m sure there is a security or permissions thing. The issue I have is that for local dev it’s a pain, because that directory is “hidden”. So you can’t browse to it with your finder and have a look at what’s going on. No, you’re almost forced to do any viewing and managing through the terminal (I say almost, because you can always open up the terminal and type…

…and finder will open the directory in the finder for you. If you’re like me, “open .” is a life saver in the terminal.

Well with CatSlapper, you can pick anywhere you want your Tomcat installed. Personally I added a Tomcat directory in my User directory right next to sites.

There are weird permission issues

There is something weird with the Tomcat Manager that means you can’t add Components (or even see anything outside the very top level of the tree until you do something with the manager. I’m still unclear what I did, and the documentation is super hazy, but if you can’t see your OOTB Tomcat components then you probably have that issue. I’ll try a replicate what I did and get the info in here soon.

How to make a web app be deployed from anywhere

Now this for me is the $12 reason to buy this application. Previously, when I had a manually installed Tomcat, hidden away out of site in usr/local the only way I could view pages I was developing in JSP was to setup a symbolic link from the folder I was working in into the tomcat webapps directory. All of this through the terminal. Although some would argue that is the easiest thing in the world, it was always on the verge of falling over, I was never in my comfort zone. Catslapper makes it easy as pie. You leave your development locations as they are, and just add a new component in catslapper and point it at the new location. To do this, you go to the components tab, click on the little up and down triangles at the far left on the local host line and you’ll get a weird tooltip that says deploy webapp.

Click that and you’ll get a popup window, in here you need to add the context path that you want the app to appear at when you go to

localhost:8080/contextPathHere

There are some other ‘advanced’ options and then there is a text field for “WAR or directory URL”. If you’re doing some simple JSP dev work and you just want to see it in a browser then this is the option for you. What you put in here took me a while of trial and error to find out so here it is:

file:/Path/To/Your/Directory

That’s it.

So the above will now make the contents of

/Users/Sykes/Sites/newApp

appear when you fire up a browser and go to

http://localhost:8080/newApp

And that is that.

I’m fairly confident that there is a ton of other features in there and that this is probably capable of more than my simple UI dev needs have, but that last point was well worth the $12 I spent on it. Oh I almost forgot, it comes with a dashboard widget as well, which is never a bad thing.