out-of-the-box…. ?!?

Ah Monday morning, fresh start of the week. Today I am going to deploy the new version of our business process that we modeled using JBPM. Luckily JBPM provides a starter kit that enables you to deploy your process definitions. The readme promises me an out-of-the-box experience:

The enterprise archive can be deployed on JBoss out-of-the-box.

Let’s see if my definition of out-of-the-box is the same as the JBoss one.

I deployed the ear file and navigate to the application https://xebia.com/blog:8080/jbpm-console and got a NullPointerException right in my faces.

08:28:33,305 ERROR [STDERR] 10/09/2007 08:28:33 com.sun.facelets.FaceletViewHandler handleRenderException
SEVERE: Error Rendering View[/common/login.xhtml]
java.lang.NullPointerException

Okay no worries I just restart JBoss and back to the url and yes it works…. so it seams.
Let’s login and deploy the new process. The login page tells me that the JBoss employees must really enjoy their job because they came up with funny usernames like bert, ernie and cookie monster. The page also gives me the passwords to login so I try with my childhood friend ernie.

Hmmmm... Check you caps lock, put on your glasses and try again.
Please, use any of the following username and password combinations.

Okay I check my caps lock, nope it’s not on (or off), borrowed glasses from my co-worker and tried again:

Hmmmm... Check you caps lock, put on your glasses and try again.
Please, use any of the following username and password combinations.

Tssss… back to the log files then:

08:32:11,669 ERROR [UsersRolesLoginModule] Failed to load users/passwords/role files
java.io.IOException: No properties file: users.properties or defaults: defaultUsers.properties found
at org.jboss.security.auth.spi.Util.loadProperties(Util.java:315)

After an hour of googling, swearing and trial and error I gave up and decide to do it myself. I guess I have to redefine my definition of out-of-the-box when working with JBoss…