The Orbeon Forms documentation (see parent article's References section) explains the installation well enough. I'm going to assume you're comfortable installing a .war file into a Tomcat installation (copy the .war file to the Tomcat application's 'webapps' directory, whew). Instead I'll just say a few words about setting up Tomcat.
I'm going to assume you'd like to run Tomcat as a non-root user. So, first, of course, create that user. Make that user the owner of your Tomcat installation.
You need Java installed of course. I use Oracle's latest 1.6 JDK. Then I create a file to set up the JVM's runtime environment. I source this file from Tomcat's startup.sh and shutdown.sh scripts. I also modify these scripts so that Tomcat runs as my designated user. The environment setup file on my laptop looks like:
unset CLASSPATH export JAVA_HOME=/local/apps/java export JAVA_OPTS='-server -Xmx384M -Xms384M -XX:NewSize=64m -XX:MaxNewSize=192m -XX:SurvivorRatio=2 -XX:PermSize=128m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m -XX:+UseAdaptiveSizePolicy -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:+UseParNewGC -verbose:gc -Xloggc:/var/log/tomcat/gc.log -XX:+PrintGCDetails -XX:+PrintGCTimeStamps -Djava.awt.headless=true -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true' export CATALINA_HOME=/local/apps/tomcat export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
I source this file in my startup and shutdown scripts. The startup.sh and shutdown.sh scripts live in Tomcat's /bin directory of course. I modify them as follows (adjust to suit your setup):
startup.sh: # replace this # exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" start "$@" # su - tomcat --shell=/bin/bash -c ' \ source /local/etc/tomcat/environment.sh && \ exec /local/apps/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh start' shutdown.sh: # replace this # exec "$PRGDIR"/"$EXECUTABLE" stop "$@" # source /local/etc/tomcat/environment.sh && \ exec /local/apps/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh stop
You might find the wiki documentation about debug logging useful while doing development work. I did.