Starting the Web server

This documentation assumes that you know what MAT_PKG_HOME refers to. See the "Conventions" section in your platform-specific instructions in the "Getting Started" section of the documentation.

NOTE: In most cases, the MAT UI relies on MAT tasks to guide your work. The tasks must be installed before you start the Web server in order for the MAT UI to know about them. MAT comes with few sample tasks to get you started, but these tasks are not installed by default. See tutorial 1 for instructions on how to install the sample tasks.

All platforms

You have two options for running the Web infrastructure. In all cases, you can run the MATWeb script in a shell; in some cases, if you can provide the appropriate multipane terminal application, you can use it via the --spawn_tabbed_terminal option to MATWeb. To find out whether tabbed terminals are available in your installation, invoke MATWeb with the --help option and consult the details for --spawn_tabbed_terminal.

If you have tabbed terminals and you choose to use them, you'll be presented with four panes:

Pane 1: the interactive loop for the Web server
Pane 2: the message output for the Web server
Pane 3: the error output for the Web server
Pane 4: the output for the annotation thread of the Web server

Either in pane 1, or in the console if you've just started up MATWeb without the multipane terminal, you'll see something like this:

Web server started on port 7801.

Web server command loop. Commands are:

exit       - exit the command loop and stop the Web server
loopexit   - exit the command loop, but leave the Web server running
taggerexit - shut down the tagger service, if it's running
restart    - restart the Web server
ws_key     - show the workspace key
help, ?    - this message

Workspace key is S6KHBrVEk3RI1dM5XU7q5CQ8vNILokXI
Command:

The workspace key is an element of workspace security; a new key is generated each time the user starts the Web server (but is preserved if the user issues the "restart" command in the command loop).

The MAT Web server is NOT SECURE

The MAT Web server is not an enterprise-secure implementation, and will never be one. It does not use SSL; in workspace mode, it does not perform any sort of user authentication beyond the workspace key; it does not provide any security logging or traceability. You should assume that anyone who has access to your network can see your Web server traffic, and either observe or (in the case of workspaces) overwrite your data.

Details for each platform follow.

Unix and MacOS X

Once you've built the toolkit, you can start MATWeb with its default arguments as follows:

% cd $MAT_PKG_HOME
% bin/MATWeb

You'll see the output of the Web server console, interspersed with other status messages from the Web server. To shut down MATWeb, type "exit" or hit Ctrl-C.

Windows native

Once you've built the toolkit, open a cmd shell, via Start -> Run -> "cmd". In this shell, type the following at the command prompt if you want to start up your server with its default arguments:

> cd %MAT_PKG_HOME%
> bin\MATWeb.cmd

You'll see the output of the Web server console, interspersed with other status messages from the Web server. You can exit this application by typing "exit" or hit Ctrl-C.