installation issues on ubuntu 14.04

I have tried 4 installation process : 1) The Bonita studio with its default engine+portal, and I realised that an independant installation of engine+portal was necessary (the database was empty at each restart). 2) The Tomcat bundle. The first attempt was a total mess :) 3) The Deploy bundle, with apt-get install Tomcat. My Tomcat installation and configuration was a total faillure. 4) The JBoss bundle. There was too many configuration files to modify, located in too many directories that have same name, but different locations... finally, it was a total mess and JBoss did not worked properly. 5) Finally, I went back to Tomcat bundle and I did it thanks to the experience of faillures with Deploy and JBoss.

There are a few important things I can point out : 1) The installation guides are not written as linear and self contained processes. The reader has to switch between at least 3 tabs in firefox : bundle installation guide, database installation guide, final steps, bonita forum, linux forums, ubuntu documentation. As client server systems never work at first install/config attempt, one always has to roll back at least once. This is precisely the moment when the scattering of information in many places (firefox tabs and RUNNING.txt) generates confusion. 2) The guides do not suit well to people that are not comfortable with advanced system administration and web-application concepts. I am just a C/Fortran developper, familiar with Linux. I can feel that too many informations are hidden between the lines. For instance, the guides do not always provide the full list of system log files to watch at each configuration step. This kind of situation is troublesome for someone who is not aware of Tomcat or JBoss architecture, functionnalities and paradigms. I type commands that I don't really understand, so I need feedbacks such as error logs, ps aux, phpmyadmin, etc... 3) Furthermore, the scattering of information does not help web-app dummies who need a one-screen global vision, in order to understand a bit more what is being done (where am I, where do I go, how many steps).

In my initial post, I was quite upset :) and I needed someone to tell me, "yes, you can because I have just done it easily".

Anyway, in my opinion, web-app dummies working in small businesses like me, do not care about the choice of a database system. I install the bundle on localhost, and later, maybe, I will put that in a VM, but I will never try to integrate Bonita into the core of my enterprise information system since its low level system management is outsourced... Only the big boss can ask things to root. In other words, there are too many useless options in bundle packages. For example, if mySQL was inside the bundle and mandatory, the H2 removal would be unnecessary and the installation would be much simpler.