Recently I’ve been setting up a new development environment for a new web application a friend of mine had prototyped.

My friend told me that he was running the application on a Glassfish application server and I thought it might be a good idea working with a new application server, so I decided to set up my IDE which is JetBrains IDEA 9.0.2 EAP (I like to be cutting edge) using the Glassfish application server. Here is what yuo need to do to get things up and running.

Getting Glassfish v3

Download the latest stable release from the Glassfish downlaod page (in my case it is v3). I’m developing on a Mac OS system so I downloaded the zip file. After downloading, just copy the archive to an arbitrary folder and unziped the archive:

jacob$ cp Downloads/glassfish-v3.zip /Applications/DevelopmentTools/ApplicationServer

jacob$ cd /Applications/DevelopmentTools/ApplicationServer

jacob$ unzip glassfish-v3.zip

Configuring Glassfish

Go to the bin folder of your unziped version of Glassfish and run the start script.

jacob$ cd glassfishv3/glassfish/bin

jacob$ ./startserv

Now open a browser and type in http://localhost:8080/. You will see the start page of Glassfish application server. Go to the administration console and change the administrator password to something you can remember. Now you are ready to open JetBrains IDEA and to configure your application.

Configuring IDEA

Add the Glassfish server under edit configuration and enter the admin password you created in the last step.

Now you are ready to setup your web application in the deployment tab. That’s it. You’re done. Now start the server and check your application start page.

It’s very easy, try it yourself.