Re: Integrated portlet development enviroment

Wow, thanks Marcus! Knowledge about the internal workings of the WTP plugins
can help a lot.

I'm gonna try that out.

On 3/9/07, Marcus A Christie <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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
>