Endymion Saké
Installation Guide

The Saké framework comes to you in the form of a "web application", as defined by the Java Servlet API version 2.3 standard. Recent improvements to the Servlet API standards mean that you can generally install the Saké web application with a simple file copy operation. If you use a servlet container that supports only version 2.1 of the Servlet API then you can still use Saké, but installation might be a bit different. We include directions for both 'the old way' and 'the new way' to install Saké.

Servlet containers that support version 2.2 or above:
If you are using a servlet container that supports version 2.2 or above of the Servlet API specifications, then you can use this simple installation method. Installing web applications into these servlet containers is really easy. If you have the WAR file distribution then you can just drop it into the "webapps" directory in your servlet container and then restart the servlet container. When it restarts, it will have built the tree illustrated in Figure 1 for you.

If you are using the compressed tar archive or the zipped distribution, then you can install it by just unpacking this distribution into your "webapps" directory under your servlet container. Your "webapps" directory should end up with a subdirectory called "sake" that contains the "WEB-INF" directory, as shown in Figure 1:

Figure 1: The structure of a Saké installation under the "webapps" directory in an example servlet container.

Restart your servlet container, and then just go to http://your-server/sake/mail, and you should see Saké Mail running. All of the configuration is handled behind the scenes for you by the Servlet API and by the meta-file "web.xml" in your "WEB-INF" directory. Any Java classes needed by Saké will automatically be loaded from the "sake.jar" file in the "lib" directory. You don't really have to do anything other than mess with Saké's configuration files once you decide that you want to start adjusting your installation. It should just run right out of the box though. Pretty nifty, isn't it?

If you have any problems at all with that process, please contact us and we'll be happy to help you out.

Servlet containers that only support version 2.1:
If your servlet container only supports version 2.1 of the Servlet API, then installation is a bit more involved because you don't get the benefit of the standardized directory structure and automatic configuration described above. You can still use Saké, but you have to explicitly tell your servlet container how to find the class files that it includes and you will have to explicitly tell Saké how to find itself. It's uglier and more involved, and if it's at all possible then we recommend upgrading to a servlet container that supports at least version 2.2 of the Servlet API.

If you can't do that though, or if the above installation mechanism doesn't work for you for some reason and you want to do it manually, then you can still do that. The installation instructions for older servlet containers is described here.