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Cross-Portal/Container/JVM Development
A Presentation By:
Jason Shao, Director of Product Development
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Agenda
Agenda
Portlet Containers & Platforms
“Categories” of containers & the Landscape
Challenges
Programming APIs & Practices
Deployment Challenges
Look & Feel/Consistency
Portable vs. Non-portable
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Portlet Containers & Platforms
What have people used?
What have people heard of?
What *else* have people heard of?
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Portlet Containers & Platforms
The list:
Pluto
Tomcat
OC4J
uPortal
Liferay
Exo
Sakai
OpenPortal/WebSynergy/???
Webcenter
Peoplesoft Portal
Luminus, IBM Webspheere, BEA Weblogic/Plumbtree
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“Categories” of containers & the Landscape
Open Source Containers
Often leverage newer technologies
May encourage container behavior modification
Often have extensive bundled libraries
Often extend the JSR-168/286 standards
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“Categories” of containers & the Landscape
Enterprise/Commercial Containers
Many are still J2EE 1.4
Often have *looong* build/deploy processes
Often have extensive bundled libraries
Often have custom tooling/IDEs
Often extend the JSR-168/286 standards
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Challenges
Programming APIs & Practices
Deployment Challenges
Configuration Issues
Look & Feel/Consistency
Portable vs. Non-portable
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Avoid Vendor specific APIs
com.xxxshould be a warning sign
When a vendor specific API must be used,
consider wrapping the API in your own
configurable façade/adapter.
Avoid deploying vendor specific libraries along
with your portlet; chances are you could expose
the API via RMI/WebService!
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Writing Adaptors for Vendor/Platform Code and
Workarounds
• If you do end up writing an adapter for odd portal
behavior, TEST IT!
• Create some mock requests to simulate the
behavior of the portal.
• Try to be efficient in detecting the Portal vendor in
your adapter - avoid using reflection, try to pull
vendor from getPortalInfo().
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Use Old Technology
JSR168/286 don't dictate J2EE or Java version.
Stick to the tried and true servlet 2.3 specification.
In this day and age it is not likely that you'll run
into many Portal deployments running on
anything older than Java 1.3 and J2EE 2.3
Use JSTL 1.0, *not* 1.1!
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Avoid using JSP 2.0/JSTL 1.1/EL
taglibs, EL, and JSP evaluation is one of the biggest
pain points in writing cross platform code.
Avoid using EL in conjunction with taglibs
(<spring:formcommandName=\"${commandName
}\"> = “world of hurt“
try <spring:formcommandName=\"<%=
pageContext.getAttribute(\"commandName\")%>”
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Avoid Pre-compiling JSPs
This technique can introduce run-time
dependencies on taglibs, libraries
These may not be the same if you develop in a
different container than you deploy in
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Alternatively use velocity or freemarker for your
views (easy to do if you're writing Spring MVC!)
• They're guaranteed to work in a Java 1.4 & J2EE
2.3 environment.
• Be wary of the fact that its harder to hire devs that
know FTL than those that know JSPs!
• Also be wary of the fact that taglibs are harder to
use from FTL than from JSPs (obviously).
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Avoid using Java 1.5 or newer features.
Many of the APIs that come with 1.6 can be
obtained as separate packages and most of the
1.5 features can be emulated in 1.4.
If you *must* use 1.5 code (believe me I
understand - Spring annotation configuration is
sooo much easier than xml-hell; type-safe
collections save you time too) try retroweaver.
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Be aware of JVM Differences
Run unit tests on all deployment-target JVMs .
You'll be surprised how different the IBM JDK and
compiler are from the Sun JDK and compiler!
Not just class libraries, but things like string
equality (.equals vs ==; == has some “hilarious
properties” on IBM JVMs)
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Build & Deployment Automation is a Need, not
a Want for cross-Container Development
• At CampusEAI we have a system which allows us
to automatically deploy a portlet to Oracle or
Liferay portal (or both) following an SVN commit.
• Maven is an easy way to automate builds and
script deployments - use the antrun +ssh/scp
tasks; avoid vendor-specific ANT deployment tasks
- these are *hard* to get to work right.
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Challenges : Programming APIs & Practices
Establish a minimum dependency development
environment
• portlet-archetype where you have a Portal
environment with the BARE minimums:
• barely functioning Portal (pluto) + portlet
container (jetty) and an isolated class loader.
• This will help you both increase productivity and
increase the probability that your code will work
in a more \"complicated\" environment.
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Challenges : Deployment Challenges
Deployment Challenges : App Servers
J2EE Servers and Servlet containers are never
compliant with the specs. Expect things to fail.
Use the 2.3 web.xml descriptor format; make sure
it validates
Some older Portal versions (WPS 5.1, Oracle
10.1.2/OC4J 10.1.2) don't support the 2.4 spec
Make sure that your Servlet container loads
classes from your portlet web application first
IBM WAS, Tomcat/JBoss and Oracle use
*radically* different class loader hierarchies
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Challenges : Deployment Challenges
If something doesn’t work quite right, Google!
• Many issues: classloaders, username formats, etc.
can be worked around through configuration
• Configuration workarounds are often obscure or
hard to isolate in documentation
• Deployment issues are common, and generally
already documented
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Challenges : Deployment Challenges
Deployment Challenges : Portal Servers
*Always* Use your portal container’s deployment
mechanism
*Always* Check the output of your portal
container’s deployment mechanism
Understand your container’s
configuration/descriptor files/mechanisms
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Challenges : Deployment Challenges
Investigate your container’s configuration
• Different containers will react differently to basic
calls likerequest#getRemoteUser() or
request#getAttribute(PortletRequest.USER_INFO)!
• E.g. uPortal will return “TestUser” Liferay will
\"943242\" when getRemoteUser() is invoked with a
portlet request originating from a user with a
screen name of \"TestUser”
• Liferay can be configured to return “TestUser”
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Look and Feel Consistency
Look and Feel Consistency
Extremely Hard
JSR-168/286 Standards are Very Vague on Look &
Feel, and UI Consistency
Common practices often need to be adapted for
portlet/portal environments
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Look and Feel Consistency
Portable vs. Non-Portable
This is a judgment call
Portable is harder, more expensive, requires lots
of testing, and even then has few guarantees
Strategies involving “slim” portlets which can be
easily rewritten may be simpler in the long run
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Challenges : Deployment Challenges
Test, Test, Test, Test some More
• Unit, integration, and load testing are absolutely
invaluable when writing cross-portal code.
• Try to mock as much vendor functionality as
possible in mock portlet requests.
• JUnit 3 is a pain compared with JUnit 4 or TestNG,
but ensures your tests run in 1.4...
• Different containers and platforms can have
drastically different performance profiles
1940 East 6th Street • 11th Floor • Cleveland • Ohio 44114 • Tel: 216.589.9626 • Fax: 216.589.9639 • info@campuseai.org• http://www.campuseai.org

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Look and Feel Consistency
Acknowledgements
Development staff at CampusEAI
Our many members
Eugene Rachitskiy, CampusEAI Lead Architect
1940 East 6th Street • 11th Floor • Cleveland • Ohio 44114 • Tel: 216.589.9626 • Fax: 216.589.9639 • info@campuseai.org• http://www.campuseai.org

live. learn. work. play.
Cross-Portal/Container/JVM Development
A Presentation By:
Jason Shao, Director of Product Development
1940 East 6th Street • 11th Floor • Cleveland • Ohio 44114 • Tel: 216.589.9626 • Fax: 216.589.9639 • info@campuseai.org• http://www.campuseai.org