Or, “Installing Flex Data Services 2 Express as a Windows Service”

This guide is for those who know nothing of Tomcat, yet are sick of having a command prompt in the background when you are trying to work with FDS. I’ll assume that you’re running Windows, and that you’re doing this on your local machine, so you don’t have to worry about firewall settings.

Step 1: Download and install Tomcat
Go to
http://tomcat.apache.org/download-55.cgi and download the latest Binary Distribution for Windows.
Run the installer, and choose all the default options (unless you really want to change them, and understand the implications)

Step 2: Download and install FDS2
Go to
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flex and download Flex Data Services 2 Express for Windows.
Run the installer, except when you get to the "JRUN or J2EE" option, pick J2EE

Step 3: Download and install JOTM
Go to http://forge.objectweb.org/projects/jotm/ and download the latest version of JOTM (I downloaded jotm-2.0.10.tgz).
Decompress that file, and there’ll be a new directory called "jotm-2.0.10"
Inside that directory, there’s a lib directory.
Copy everything that’s inside jotm-2.0.10lib to C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationTomcat 5.5commonlib

Step 4: Copy FDS files to Tomcat
Copy flex.war, flex-admin.war, and samples.war from C:fds2 to C:Program FilesApache Software FoundationTomcat 5.5webapps

Step 5: Restart the Apache Tomcat service
I hope you remember where the services console is

Step 6: Test it out
If you did the default options, you should be able to go to http://localhost:8080/samples/ and run the sample applications.