Under the Hood – BIRT iHub F-Type: Understanding the Processes

While your customers don’t need to see the inner workings of your app, as a developer, you need to be the master of its parts…

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Jesse Freeman

January 22, 20154 minutes read

While your customers don’t need to see the inner workings of your app, as a developer, you need to be the master of its parts and processes. It’s time to get under the hood.

Hello BIRT community! My name is Jesse Freeman. Although I am not new to BIRT or Actuate, I am transitioning into a significantly more community-centric role. I have spent the last two years working as a Customer Support Engineer for Actuate, specializing in the server and designer products. I am excited to bring my product and support knowledge to the larger BIRT community.

I come from a Java/JavaScript background and am a big fan of multi-platform, open source and open standard technologies. I am an advocate of Linux operating systems and have used or dabbled with the majority of the larger Linux distributions. In particular, I am a big fan of Arch Linux and CentOS.

Over the next several weeks I will publish a series of blogs that will bring my support knowledge to the community. The series will include posts on understanding the BIRT iHub F-Type’s processes and configuration as well as troubleshooting. This series will provide technical insight for anybody who will be configuring and/or maintaining a BIRT iHub F-Type installation.

BIRT iHub F-Type is a free BIRT server released by Actuate. It incorporates virtually all the functionality of commercially available BIRT iHub and is limited only by the capacity of output it can deliver on a daily basis, making it ideal for departmental and smaller scale applications. When BIRT iHub F-Type reaches its maximum output capacity, additional capacity is available as an in-app purchase.
Understanding the Processes

The first topic of my Under the Hood blog series is titled Understanding the Processes. When I first started in support, one of the first pieces of information I learned was the breakdown of all of the processes and their specific roles. This information was invaluable for the duration of my time providing support. Understanding the processes and their responsibilities provides insight into how the product works for configuration and integration purposes, and helps us understand where to look for more information if an issue arises.

With that in mind, here is the list of the BIRT iHub F-Type processes and their responsibilities:

  • ihubd – This is the daemon process responsible for the initial startup of BIRT iHub F-Type. The ihubd process starts the ihubc and ihubservletcontainer processes.  If issues occur during startup, this is one of the first processes to examine.
  • ihubservletcontainer – As the name implies, this process is the front end servlet container for the BIRT iHub F-Type. This process is hosted out of an integrated Tomcat within BIRT iHub, which means anybody who is familiar with Tomcat should feel right at home when configuring or troubleshooting of the process.
  • ihubc – This is the parent of all other processes started by BIRT iHub,  including the ihub, jsrvrihub and jfctsrvrihub processes.  The ihubc is the SOAP endpoint for BIRT iHub’s communication, the job dispatcher, and resource group manager, and also takes requests from front-end applications such as the integrated Information Console.
  • ihub – The ihub process is responsible for communication with the metadata database as well as the Report Server Security Extension (RSSE) if one has been implemented.
  • jsrvrihub – Within a single installation there may be multiple jsrvrihub processes running simultaneously. A typical out-of-the-box installation will have at least two. One of these two typical jsrvrihub processes is used for the viewing of dashboards and the other is used for execution and viewing of reports transiently.
  • jfctsrvrihub – The jfcsrvrihub process is used for the execution of background jobs on BIRT iHub. This includes any report that is explicitly scheduled to run at a specific time (or immediately) and allows reports to be output to a directory within the ihub process rather than viewed immediately within the current browser session.

Whether beginning an installation, working on an integration project, or troubleshooting an existing installation,  this information will assist you with knowing the process that needs to be examined.

Thank you for reading.  Subscribe to this blog and you will be first to know when I publish my next Under the Hood – BIRT iHub F-Type series with a review of the Primary Configuration Files. Download BIRT iHub F-Type today so you can follow along.

If you have any questions, post them in the comments below or in the BIRT iHub F-Type forum.

-Jesse

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Jesse Freeman

Jesse is an evangelist for anything OpenText Analytics related.

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