Re: Integrated portlet development enviroment

Jörn Zaefferer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm looking for a portlet container or portal server that can be used to 
> develope and test portlets, without the delaying overhead of a heavy 
> portal server like Websphere Portal (my target platform).
> 
> My attempts to use Pluto from Eclipse (with WTP plugins) were rather 
> unsuccessful. I need a way to auto-deploy or publish the changed code 
> into the running server runtime.
> 
> Simply using the pluto-bundled tomcat from within Eclipse doesn't work, 
> as Eclipse recognizes only Tomcat as the runtime, and strips all other 
> webapps (like pluto) when starting tomcat.
> 
> Any hint on how to setup Pluto or some portal server using Pluto, or any 
> other server, as a fast and efficient development enviroment is highly 
> appreciated.
> 
> Thanks and regards
> Jörn Zaefferer

You can coerce Eclipse to work with the bundled pluto.  I'm writing this 
up and will post it to my blog (http://marcus-christie.blogspot.com/) as 
soon as I get it all ready, but here is the relevant part of the 
instructions, posted below:


Begin excerpt.....


(Now we want to right click on hello-world-portlet.xhtml and select Run 
As > Run On Server, and this time we need to select the Tomcat server 
from the Pluto 1.1.0 bundle.  This won't work the first time, 
unfortunately.  What is going on is that Eclipse is copying the Tomcat 
server files to a new temporary location and deploying our portlet 
webapp there.  However, the shared/lib directory, the pluto webapp 
directory and some other needed files don't get copied over.  So after 
we start the Pluto-Tomcat server running, we then need to go in a do a 
bit of surgery.  The temporary location of the Tomcat server will be 
under WORKSPACE_HOME/.metadata/.plugins/org.eclipse.wst.server.core 
where WORKSPACE_HOME is the location of your Eclipse workspace.  The 
actual directory will be named tmp0, or tmp1, etc.  Find it, then copy 
the following directories from the Pluto 1.1.0 bundle into this directory:

     * shared (e.g., copy C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\pluto-1.1.0\shared to 
C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1)
     * conf/Catalina (e.g., copy C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\pluto-1.1.0\conf\Catalina to 
C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1\conf)
     * PlutoDomain (e.g., copy C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\pluto-1.1.0\PlutoDomain to 
C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1)
     * webapps/pluto (e.g., copy C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\pluto-1.1.0\webapps\pluto to 
C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1\webapps)
     * webapps/testsuite (e.g., copy C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\pluto-1.1.0\webapps\testsuite to 
C:\Documents and 
Settings\machrist\Desktop\eclipse-home\workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.wst.server.core\tmp1\webapps)


(Note:  Looks like WTP 2.0, which will probably be available in the next 
Eclipse release, will allow you to specify the location of your Tomcat 
server and with that these manual steps of syncing up the deployed 
Tomcat with Eclipse's temporary location Tomcat server would be eliminated.)

Now our portlet should deploy correctly into the Pluto/Tomcat server. 
After deploying the portlet from within Eclipse, open up your browser to 
http://localhost:8080/pluto/portal.  Login as user pluto, password 
pluto.  In the upper left hand corner there is a label called 
"Navigation:".  Mouse over this label to get a popup menu.  Then select 
Pluto Admin from this list.  Under Pluto Pages, select Secondary Page 
from the drop down list.  Then under Portlet Applications, select 
hello-world-jsf-facelets in the first drop down, and then in the second 
drop down select HelloWorldSamplePortlet.  Now, navigate to the 
Secondary Page, and your portlet should be there at the bottom of the page.
(Note: You may have to restart the server in Eclipse to get it so that 
the facelets application loads correctly and works.)  Note that the 
portlet pages configuration doesn't persist across restarts of the Pluto 
server.  Consult the Pluto documentation if you want to persist the 
portal pages layout and configuration.


End excerpt.......

-- 
Marcus Christie
Phone: 812-855-4081
Home page: http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~machrist