Startup considerations for Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition

When you open a project in the starter edition, two things happen:

• Rational® Integration Tester HTTP/TCP proxy starts running in the background, listening for local connections on port 3128. For information about the use of the proxy, see Getting Started Tutorial 3: Discovery, Recording, and Interception (HTTP proxy).
• Rational Test Control Panel server starts running in the background, listening for local connections on port 5443. The main function of Rational Test Control Panel is to be the hub of communication between Rational Integration Tester and the HTTP proxy. Rational Test Control Panel also provides some sample APIs that you can use while you work with the starter edition.

The starter edition starts these two processes to help you get started with the tool. You can disable the automatic startup of these processes in the user preferences (Project > Preferences). These preferences apply to all projects opened by that user on that computer. If you are an advanced user, you might want to disable automatic startup and start these processes manually.

• To start the Rational Test Control Panel server, from the command line, run the startup.bat file (on Windows systems) or startup.sh file (on non Windows systems) from the following location Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory\Apps\RTCP\bin. To stop the Rational Test Control Panel server, from the command line, run the shutdown.bat file (on Windows systems) or shutdown.sh file (on non Windows systems) from the following location Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory\Apps\RTCP\bin.
• To start the HTTP proxy, from the command line, run the startup.bat file (on Windows systems) or startup.sh file (on non Windows systems) from the following location Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory\Apps\HttpTcpProxy. To stop the HTTP proxy, use the kill command to stop the process that was started by the startup.bat or startup.sh file. If this process is running in a command prompt window, pressing Ctrl + C in that window ends the process.

These are the reasons why you might want to start the processes manually:

• Tests and virtual services can be run as part of headless unattended automated processes by using the RunTests command. The RunTests command does not automatically start Rational Test Control Panel or the proxy, irrespective of the user preference.
• If a test environment or live system is configured to use the proxy, you want the proxy running continuously. Otherwise, when you exit the starter edition, the proxy stops and the test environment or live system stops functioning as they cannot connect to the proxy.
• It is best if the proxy is co-located with the test environment or live system, which it is being used with. To achieve co-location, follow these steps:
  1. Install the starter edition in the location that you want.
     Note: On Windows computers, Rational Test Control Panel Starter Edition fails to start if you run the build from a path that includes a folder that is named with non-English characters.
  2. Start Rational Test Control Panel and the proxy manually (or by some task runner or process manager).
  3. Configure projects in Rational Integration Tester on users' workstations with the URL for that instance of Rational Test Control Panel.
  4. Make note of the host name or IP address that the Rational Integration Tester workbench or desktop application will use to connect to the server on which Rational Test Control Panel will be running.
  5. On the server where you will be running Rational Test Control Panel, extract the starter edition .zip file.
  6. Open this file for editing: Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory/Apps/RTCP/usr/servers/defaultServer/server.xml. On the XML element, <httpEndpoint> change the attribute host="localhost" to host="*".
  7. Open this file for editing: Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory/Apps/RTCP/usr/servers/defaultServer/apps/RTCP.war/WEB-INF/classes/container.server.properties. Change the rtcp.base.url property to contain the host name that will be used to connect to the host on which Rational Test Control Panel was extracted.
  8. Optionally, if the HTTP proxy is not extracted on the same host as Rational Test Control Panel, then you must change Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition installation directory/Apps/HttpTcpProxy/registration.xml (on the computer where the proxy will run) to point to the host on which Rational Test Control Panel will run.
  9. For any instances of Rational Integration Tester Starter Edition workbench or desktop application, for each project, you must change the project server settings (Project > Project Settings then Server Settings tab) to update the Rational Test Control Panel URL to point to the host on which the server is running.
• By co-locating the proxy with the test environment or live system, multiple users can share a proxy from a common test environment or live system.

When you use the Infrastructure Dashboard in Rational Test Control Panel, you see that the version number for the HTTP/TCP proxy includes a letter at the end, for example, 9.0.0.0a. The letter indicates that this proxy is the starter edition proxy. Starter edition versions always include a letter at the end, and that is part of the version number.