Online Proposal Appraisal

It wasn't painless.

Firstly install mysql and mysql-server packages (for mysqld daemon)

The tricky bit was to make an opa.war out of the opa
subdirectory of the opa distribution.

You need to do this to avoid having to edit the tomcat/conf/server.xml file.

cp standard.jar opa/WEB-INF/lib
cp jstl.jar opa/WEB-INF/lib

mkdir opa/META-INF
cp opa.xml opa/META-INF/context.xml

apparently the context.xml file doesn't work
properly with tomcat-5.5.16 so I had to modify it a bit so
it reads:

<Resource name="jdbc/opa" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000"
username="root" password="myrootpass" driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
url="jdbc:mysql://localhost/opa?autoReconnect=true"/>

The ResourceParam elements didn't seem to be recognised
for some reason.

anyway, after that make the war file as :
jar -cf opa.war -C opa .
where you are sitting in the toplevel dir of the opa distribution.

Then drop opa.war in your tomcat/webapps dir and for me at least
stop/start the tomcat server and the opa.war is expanded and tomcat reads the context.xml file from the war.

Had a bit of trouble connecting to the MySQL server running
on localhost, but I think that was mostly my MySQL ignorance.

Hope this might help someone else get started a little more easily
someday.