Getting started with Portofino 5

Prerequisite: Java installation

First, let's ensure that Java 8+ (JRE or JDK) is installed on our system by typing on a system command prompt:

java -version

We should get back something along the lines of:

java version "1.8.0_171"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_171-b11)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.171-b11, mixed mode)

Note that Java 8 is the minimum supported release, but it's quite old, and the long-term supported Java 11 is recommended.

Install Portofino

First, let's download it from SourceForge.

We should have downloaded a file named portofino-5.0.3.zip. Note that 5.0.3 is the latest version at the time of writing, but a new version might be available now. Let's simply extract the archive to a place of our choice. It's better to avoid paths with spaces in them, if possible.

Optional: install additional JDBC drivers

In order to connect to certain commercial database systems such as Oracle, we need to add a JDBC driver to the lib directory of Tomcat.