Quick Starts

If you are feeling lucky, you can now start the PIA with the command:

./PIA/bin/pia ./PIA/Doc

Assuming all went well, you can now click on the following link: http://localhost:8888/ to point your browser at a PIA-based web server that happens to be serving the PIA's online documentation.

If that didn't work, try reading the next section on Initial Setup, possibly followed by the section on Troubleshooting in Using the PIA

If it did work, you should now try to start the PIA in its default configuration as a platform for web-based applications, with the command:

./PIA/bin/pia

At this point, you know that the PIA is working. You can now do one of three things:

1. Go on to the next section to find out how to set up your environment variables to make the PIA easier to use.
2. Read the online documentation.
3. Play with the PIA some more.

Do you have access to a directory (let's call it html_dir) with some HTML files in it? (If not, skip to the "active web server" section following). Start the PIA with the command

PIA/bin/pia html_dir

[this command tells the PIA to serve files from html_dir; you should see some initialization messages and a "Point your browswer to..." URL the end.]

Next, view a page file (say my_page.html) by pointing your browser as the PIA suggests, for example

http://penguin.crc.ricoh.com:8888/my_page.html

You should see your page displayed, just as if it were displayed by a regular web server like Apache.

To serve active pages, all you need is some active pages to serve! So copy a home.xh file from one of PIA/Samples/[HelloWorld,FileHandling,Form,PrettyStuff] into html_dir (for example, on Unix cp PIA/Samples/HelloWorld/home.xh html_dir/home.xh ).

Point the browser at one of these new active pages, e.g.

http://penguin.crc.ricoh.com:8888/home.xh

You should see our page displayed, in which case you can you can learn more options for setting up the PIA from the sections below, or you can tinker with it (with help from the Author's guide).

In the long run you will probably want to serve files from a different directory (like the .pia directory described below), and you will probably want to have many different "sub-site" directories of active pages (see the Author's Guide).

You can now start the PIA Web server from the command line:
> bin/pia HTML_DOCS
Where HTML_DOCS is the root directory for the files to be served by the PIA Web server. (As explained below, you can also specify a configuration file instead of the root directory.) "bin/pia" is a simple wrapper that starts up a java program; you should see some initialization messages ending with "Point your browswer to http://localhost:8888/" which indicates that the server is up and running.

You can also just run
> bin/pia
Which uses a default configuration file _subsite.xcf to serve up pages in the PIA_HOME, which includes the PIA documentation and example applications. Running bin/pia and then browsing http://localhost:8888/ is the recommended method for getting acquainted with the capabilities of the PIA. In particular, Agents/Tutorial and Samples (http://localhost:8888/Agents/Tutorial/ http://localhost:8888/Samples/) demonstrate the unique properties of the PIA server side markup language.