Put Your IDE in a Container with Guacamole

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Apache Guacamole is an incubating Apache project that enables X window applications to be exposed via HTML5 and accessed via a browser. This article shows how Guacamole can be run inside containers in an OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) cluster to enable Red Hat JBoss Developer Studio, the eclipse-based IDE for the JBoss middleware portfolio, to be accessed via a web browser. You’re probably thinking “Wait a minute… X windows applications in a container?” Yes, this is entirely possible and this post will show you how. Bear in mind that tools from organizations like CODENVY can provide a truly cloud-ready IDE. In this post, you’ll see how organizations that have an existing well-established IDE can rapidly provision developer environments where each developer only needs a browser. JBoss Developer Studio includes a rich set of integration tools and I’ll show how those can be added to a base installation to support middleware products like JBoss Fuse and JBoss Data Virtualization.

How does Apache Guacamole work?

Apache Guacamole consists of two main components, the Guacamole web application (known as the guacamole-client) and the Guacamole daemon (or guacd). An X windows application runs in an Xvnc environment with an in-memory only display. The guacd daemon acts as an Xvnc client, consuming the Xvnc events and sending them to the Tomcat guacamole-client web application where they are then rendered to the client browser as HTML5. Guacamole also supports user authentication, multiple sessions, and other features that this article only touches on. The Apache Guacamole website has more information.

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