I was very curios to take AWS for a quick test drive so I lost six hours of a precious beauty sleep and compiled this blog-post-capsule for future generations.

The Quest

* Run an “Hello World!!!1” Servlet on EC2 (less than $0.01 per hour)
* Create a local development environment using Eclipse + AWS Toolkit for Eclipse (seems like a really interesting toolchain)

Preliminary Steps

Issues with AWS Toolkit defaults

Plan B – Create a custom EC2 AMI with Tomcat 6.something and JDK 1.6

* Launch an EC2 instance using Amazon’s ami-84db39ed AMI.  (basic Fedora 8 image)
* Use Putty connect to your instance

* Install Java on EC2 Instance

* Download JDK (“Linux RPM in self-extracting JDK file”)

mkdir /usr/local/java

cd /usr/local/java

curl http://download.java.net/jdk6/6u23/promoted/b01/binaries/jdk-6u23-ea-bin-b01-linux-i586-30_aug_2010-rpm.bin > jdk1.6.0.23-rpm.bin

chmod 755 jdk1.6.0.23-rpm.bin # Change the permission of the file

./jdk1.6.0.23-rpm.bin #Install

updatedb; locate javac | grep bin  # this step merely serves to verify the installation

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23/bin/java 100

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/jar jar /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23/bin/jar 100

/usr/sbin/alternatives –install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23/bin/javac 100

/usr/sbin/alternatives –config java # Change the default JVM from gcj to Sun’s version (if needed)

* Install Tomcat on EC2 Instance

mkdir /usr/tomcat

cd /usr/tomcat

curl http://apache.spd.co.il//tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.29/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.29.tar.gz > apache-tomcat-6.0.29.tar.gz

tar zxvf apache-tomcat-6.0.29.tar.gz

cd apache-tomcat-6.0.29

bin/startup.sh  # Start Tomcat

#!/bin/sh

# Tomcat init script for Linux.

#

# chkconfig: 2345 96 14

# description: The Apache Tomcat servlet/JSP container.

JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23

CATALINA_HOME=/usr/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29

export JAVA_HOME CATALINA_HOME

exec $CATALINA_HOME/bin/catalina.sh $*

chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/init.d/tomcat

chkconfig –level 2345 tomcat on

Are we there yet?

vi ~/.bash_profile

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23

export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29

ln -s /usr/java/jdk1.6.0_23/ /env/jdk

ln -s /usr/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.29/ /env/tomcat

What next?

protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {

response.getWriter().println(“Hello World!!!1″);

}

That’s it – I hope this will help, it does take approx. 1 hour so if you know some other way to make it work, please don’t be shy and comment.

Additional references I used to make it this far:

Free VI Tip for Dummies

WordPress 2.9 Highlights

* Global undo/”trash” feature
* Built-in image editor
* Batch plugin update and compatibility checking
* Easier video embeds
* Over 500 tickets, bugs and enhancements

WordPress 2.8 Highlights

* Speed!!!
* Theme Browser and Installer
* Ability to add Custom Headers
* New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new Widgets API
* New ways to customize dashboard widgets
* Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
* Configurable Views on Management Pages
* Faster Loading Admin Pages

S3

“Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.” (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/)

What can I do with this S3 thingy?

Many things… but I will focus on a pragmatic and more common use case – You can use S3 as the ultimate network drive to share your music collection, backup your documents or to store your blog images (a.k.a. CDN for the masses) etc.

Is it free???

Almost…   $0.15 per Giga (+ you can estimate your monthly bill using the AWS Monthly Calculator)

How do I start?

To use Amazon S3 service, you’ll simply need to open an Amazon account and register to the S3.

Interesting tools to simplify your S3 experience:

• Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer – Simple Firefox add-on that provides an FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3 – “S3Fox Organizer helps you organize/manage/store your files on Amazon S3. It is easy to install and use as it is integrated into the browser…”

• Amazon S3 WordPress plugin – This plugin will help you to stores your files on Amazon S3.

• DropBox – New Amazon-S3-backed-storage service (thanks to Shlomo for the introduction) – Very simple to use and with 2GB storage limit on the default (free) account and paid upgrade to 50GB of space for $9.99 / month which is not that much above the $7.5 they need to pay to Amazon (before optimizations ;)

P.S. If you liked DropBox you might also like many others…

Coltrane seems to have a very cool and much faster new inteface  (150 people contribution) and I didn’t have any issues until now…

Much more details (+ visual introduction) on the WordPress.org blog.

Enjoy.

I bought a Bialetti-Moka-Express which was claimed (by Bialetti…) to be the world’s number one coffee-maker (I was customer number 200,000,001) and made my very first espresso two hours ago…

This tiny “espresso pot” (a.k.a. moka in Italy) is a simple device that uses steam pressure to force water through a strainer to make espresso so I did feel a little strange putting this tiny pot directly on the burner of my stove and I didn’t really believe it will produce the bitter-black-magic, but it worked like a charm and with very little experience I manage to produce a pretty damn good espresso!

Years of Italian experience have produced a 20$ state-of-the-art coffee-maker which re-defined simplicity… (especially when I first thought of buying a 1500$ one-button coffee-maker monster engine)

——————
Bialetti Moka Express @ http://www.bialettishop.com/MokaExpressMain.htm
This is how you do it @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huC3E1c4SBs