Installation

The following preconditions must be met before you can install the Widget Framework Core:

A suitable version of the Escenic Content Engine and Escenic assembly tool have been installed as described in the Escenic Content Engine Installation Guide and are in working order.
You have the credentials needed to access Escenic's SW repositories.
The following plug-ins have been installed as described in the relevant plug-in guides, and are in working order:
- Menu Editor (3.1 or later)
- Analysis Engine (3.0 or later)

Choosing an installation method

Until recently, all Escenic-supplied components had to be installed by manually downloading and unpacking archive files. This is no longer the case. The Content Engine itself, the assembly tool, the ece scripts and all plug-ins are now available as deb packages (for installing on Ubuntu/Debian systems) and as rpm packages (for installation on RedHat/CentOS systems). This is now the recommended method of installing Escenic systems, although it is still possible to use the old method based on manually downloading and unpacking archives. Note, however, that when you are installing a plug-in on an existing Content Engine installation, you should use the same installation method as you used for the Content Engine itself.

Using the new package installation method offers many advantages over the old manual installation procedure:

It is faster and quicker
It is significantly less error-prone
It supports a fully automated upgrade process in which not only the installed packages themselves are upgraded, but also deployed EAR files. An upgrade script automatically checks the EAR files for copies of JAR files that have been updated, and replaces them with the new versions.

The old installation method will continue to be documented for the moment. Components installed using the new method are installed in /usr/share/escenic, whereas the old method recommends installation in /opt/escenic, and some other path components are slightly different. To cope with these differences, the following placeholders are used in some paths:

Placeholder	NEW METHOD path	OLD METHOD path
engine-installation	`/usr/share/escenic/escenic-content-engine-`engine-version	`/opt/escenic/engine`
assemblytool_installation	`/usr/share/escenic/escenic-assemblytool`	`/opt/escenic/assemblytool`

When installing the Widget Framework, you should use the same method as you used to install the Escenic Content Engine.

Note that if you are planning to install the Escenic Content Engine using the new package-based method, you can install the Widget Framework simultaneously by simply including the Widget Framework package name (widget-framework) in the apt-get installation command. You only need to follow this procedure if you have already installed the Content Engine and now need to install the Widget Framework.

If you use CUE as your Escenic editor, then in addition to installing the Widget Framework, you should also install a matching CUE Widget Framework plug-in into CUE. This plug-in adds template editing capabilities to CUE. Whichever method you plan to use for installing the Widget Framework itself, CUE plugins are always package-based installations. For details, see CUE Plug-in Installation.