Smartfrog Crash Course

The purpose of this document is to help you get started with smartfrog.  The developers have done a good job documenting Smartfrog, however there are some simple missing peices from the documentation, that I will hopefully be able to fill in here.

Prerequisites

This page will be worthless to you if you haven't gone through the tutorial at http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/smartfrog/releasedocs/smartfrogdoc/sfcore.html.  The "Quick Reference Manual" and "User Manual" are also very valuable.

Notes

• When you develop components and want to test them, you should point the environment variable "$SFUSERHOME" to a directory which contains a jar file of your classes.  A directory filled with class files will NOT work.

• Even after reading the tutorial, I was still confused about file system layout.  So I'll try to explain it simply.

• For sfDaemon, the imporant part is that the correct classes are in the classpath ($SFUSERHOME).  I am pretty sure that the daemon does not parse sf files at all.

• For sfStart, you'll need the .sf file on the classpath, which includes the current directory of course.

• Smartfrog uses it's own classloader.  If you are getting an error that a component can't be deployed, and you can't figure out why, then verify your class path contains all dependencies.  The SF classloader does not always throw a ClassNotFoundException when it should.