So you are a budding flex developer who likes to play with new things. You saw the announcement for the new beta of LiveCycle Data Services 2.5 on Adobe Labs and you want to play with some of the new features. So you walk your mac right on over to the LCDS 2.5 Download Page to get the installer. But wait! There is no mac installer? Now what do you do.

Fear not young budding developer. I will help you over this obstacle. The platform specific installers all come with a built in version of jrun. And without a platform installer we will have to make do with our own. This is easy enough. Since Apache Tomcat 5.5 is one of the supported platforms for use with Data Services we are gonna use it instead. So we go ahead and download the binary files of Tomcat 5.5 and download either the zip file or the tar.gz. Now back on the Adobe Labs site we grab the generic java installer of LiveCycle Data Services. Now we have everything we need to get started.

We start by installing Tomcat. This is a simple as expanding the archive we downloaded. Now for convenience sake we are going to want to put that somewhere easy to get to. Like maybe move it to Applications and rename it tomcat.

Now we can run the installer for LC DS by running our installer. Just double click the jar we downloaded and we will get an installer. Pick a location of your choosing. All this will do is give us the files we need.

With LCDS installed we need to go to the directory where we installed it and we will see that we have a flex.war file in there. This is our LiveCycle Data Services server. We are going to copy that and then paste a copy of it into the webapps directory of our tomcat folder. In finder we are going to rename that from flex.war to flex.zip and then double-click it. This will create a flex folder in this directory. Now we can delete the zip file from here.

Just like that we now have LiveCycle Data Services installed into tomcat. So lets test our installation. We need to start our tomcat server so we are going to drop to the command line (open Terminal its in the utilities folder in Applications) and type this.


/Applications/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

Then you can load http://localhost:8080/flex/ in your browser to see the FDS Template home page. Now you can create a project in flex builder for FDS using this location for the screen about your Flex Server. And now you are cooking with gas!