Portlet Example on GlassFish

FIGURE 1: Hello World Portlet in Pluto Apache Portals Console

Testing Your Own Portlet

Now that you have incorporated pluto-on-glassfish.jar into your GlassFish installation, you can run any JSR 168-compliant portlet, not only the Hello portlet provided in this article.

To develop a portlet from scratch, follow the steps in the sections Creating a Sample Portlet and Modifying the Pluto Configuration, then restart the GlassFish server. Your portlet will be deployed automatically and will be shown in the Pluto Apache Portals console shown in Figure 1.

Building the pluto-on-glassfish.jar File

This section describes how to build the pluto-on-glassfish.jar file, should you choose to build such a file yourself. This exercise is entirely optional; installing the pluto-on-glassfish.jar file and modifying the GlassFish installation as described above is sufficient for you to build and test your own portlets, as described in Creating a Sample Portlet and Modifying the Pluto Configuration.

Building the pluto-on-glassfish.jar file involves the following steps:

Creating a directory in which to package the pluto-on-glassfish.jar file and populating the directory with Pluto shared .jar files
Creating a portlet
Modifying the Pluto configuration

This section uses the variable $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR to represent the directory where Pluto 1.0.1 has been installed.

Creating and Populating a Directory

Start by creating a directory and populating it with shared and common files from the Pluto 1.0.1 distribution.

Download Pluto 1.0.1.
Expand the compressed download file in an empty directory, identified in these steps by the $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR variable.
Create a directory in which to package your .jar file. Name the directory pluto-on-glassfish.
Create a subdirectory in pluto-on-glassfish, and copy the Pluto shared/lib/*.jar and common/endorsed/*.jar files to the pluto-on-glassfish/lib directory. Copy the files with your computer's GUI, or use the following commands from a command shell.
cd pluto-on-glassfish mkdir lib cd lib cp $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/shared/lib/*.jar . cp $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/common/endorsed/*.jar .
The pluto-on-glassfish/lib directory now contains the following five files:
pluto-1.0.1.jar portlet-api-1.0.jar commons-logging-1.0.4.jar xercesImpl-2.6.2.jar xmlParserAPIs-2.6.2.jar
Note that other than relocation, these files are not changed in any way. They are used under the terms of the Apache License.

Creating a Sample Portlet

The Sun Java Studio Creator 2 integrated development environment gives you the visual tools for creating and designing portlets that can be deployed readily on Sun Java Portal Server 6.1. Other portlet containers such as Pluto may require you to manually edit the web.xml deployment descriptor.

The following steps describe how to create a portlet for use with Pluto on GlassFish. The Hello World portlet is used as an example.

Create the HelloWorldPortlet class by saving the source code shown below as HelloWorldPortlet.java and compiling it with the following command.

javac -classpath ${GLASSFISH_HOME}/lib/portlet-api-1.0.jar 
HelloWorldPortlet.java

package sample;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.portlet.GenericPortlet;
import javax.portlet.PortletException;
import javax.portlet.RenderRequest;
import javax.portlet.RenderResponse;

public class HelloWorldPortlet extends GenericPortlet {
    protected void doView(RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response) 
                          throws PortletException, IOException {
        response.setContentType("text/html");
        response.getWriter().write("Hello World!");
    }
}

Set up the web application directory structure as shown below. Steps 35 below provide the contents of the files HelloWorldPortlet.properties, web.xml, and portlet.xml.

$GLASSFISH_HOME/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-modules/
    hello/
        META-INF/
            MANIFEST.MF
        WEB-INF/
            portlet.xml
            lib/
                helloworldportlet.jar
            classes/
                HelloWorldPortlet.properties
            web.xml

Create a resource bundle for the HelloWorldPortlet class by creating the file HelloWorldPortlet.properties. Place the following lines in the file, and save the file as $GLASSFISH_HOME/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-modules/hello/WEB-INF/classes/ HelloWorldPortlet.properties.
javax.portlet.title = Hello World javax.portlet.short-title = Hello World javax.portlet.keywords = Hello,World

Create a deployment descriptor by creating the file web.xml. Place the following lines in the file, and save the file as $GLASSFISH_HOME/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-modules/hello/WEB-INF/web.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE web-app
    PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
    "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">
<web-app>
    <display-name>Sample Hello World Portlet</display-name>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>HelloWorldPortlet</servlet-name>
        <display-name>HelloWorldPortlet Wrapper</display-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.pluto.core.PortletServlet</servlet-class>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>portlet-guid</param-name>
            <param-value>hello.HelloWorldPortlet</param-value>
        </init-param>
        <init-param>
            <param-name>portlet-class</param-name>
            <param-value>sample.HelloWorldPortlet</param-value>
        </init-param>
    </servlet>
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>HelloWorldPortlet</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/HelloWorldPortlet/*</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

Create a deployment descriptor by creating the file portlet.xml. Place the following lines in the file, and save the file as $GLASSFISH_HOME/domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-modules/hello/WEB-INF/portlet.xml.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<portlet-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/portlet-app_1_0.xsd"
             xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
             xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/portlet/
                                 portlet-app_1_0.xsd/etc/opt/SUNWportal/dtd/portlet.xsd"
             version="1.0">
    <portlet>
        <portlet-name>HelloWorldPortlet</portlet-name>
        <portlet-class>sample.HelloWorldPortlet</portlet-class>
        <expiration-cache>0</expiration-cache>
        <resource-bundle>HelloWorldPortlet</resource-bundle>
        <supports>
            <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
            <portlet-mode>VIEW</portlet-mode>
        </supports>
        <portlet-info>
            <title>HelloWorldPortlet</title>
        </portlet-info>
    </portlet>
</portlet-app>

Modifying the Pluto Configuration

The following steps modify the Pluto web application and remove the test suite web application from Pluto. The test suite does not work with portlets.

Register HelloWorldPortlet for use with Pluto by editing the following file:
$PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/ portletentityregistry.xml
Add the following lines to the file, just before the final tag.
<application id="6"> <definition-id>hello</definition-id> <portlet id="0"> <definition-id>hello.HelloWorldPortlet</definition-id> </portlet> </application>
Tags in the portletentityregistry.xml file have the following meanings:
- <application> Defines one application (corresponding to one web application on the portal container), which can contain multiple tags. The id attribute in this tag identifies the application, and it does not need to be numeric.
- <definition-id> Within the file, refers to the name of the web application that contains the portlets in this application.
- <portlet> Each tag defines one portlet. The id attribute in this tag identifies the portlet. The application id, concatenated with the portlet id, is mapped to the value attribute in the tag in pageregistry.xml, as explained below.

Define the Pluto layout by editing the following file:

$PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/pageregistry.xml

Add the following lines to the file just before the final tag.

<fragment name="hello" type="page" >
    <navigation>
        <title>Hello</title>
        <description>sample portlet</description>
    </navigation>
    <fragment name="row" type="row">
        <fragment name="col1" type="column">
            <fragment name="p1" type="portlet">
                <property name="portlet" value="6.0"/>
            </fragment>
        </fragment>
     </fragment>
</fragment>

Define Pluto portlet contexts by editing the following file:
$PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/portletcontexts.txt
Add the following line at the end of the file.
/hello

Remove the test suite from the Pluto configuration.

Remove the test suite configuration from the $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/pageregistry.xml file. Open the file in an editor and remove the following lines.

<fragment name="test" type="page">
        <navigation>
            <title>Test</title>
            <description>...</description>
        </navigation>
        <fragment name="row" type="row">
            <fragment name="col1" type="column">
                <fragment name="p1" type="portlet">
                    <property name="portlet" value="3.1"/>
                </fragment>
                <fragment name="p2" type="portlet">
                    <property name="portlet" value="4.1"/>
                </fragment>
            </fragment>
        </fragment>
</fragment>

Remove the test suite configuration from the $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/portletentityregistry.xml file. Open the file in an editor and remove the following lines.

<application id="4">
    <definition-id>testsuite</definition-id>
    <portlet id="1">
        <definition-id>testsuite.TestPortlet2</definition-id>
        <preferences>
            <pref-name>TestName4</pref-name>
            <pref-value>TestValue4</pref-value>
            <read-only>true</read-only>
        </preferences>
    </portlet>
</application>

Remove the test suite configuration from the $PLUTO_INSTALL_DIR/pluto-1.0.1/webapps/pluto/WEB-INF/data/portletcontexts.txt file. Open the file in an editor and remove the following line.
/testsuite

Conclusion

In this article you learned how to use Pluto, the reference implementation of the Java Portlet Specification, along with the GlassFish Java EE 5 application server to test a sample portlet. The article then described how to configure Pluto and GlassFish to test your own portlets and how to create your own .jar file containing Pluto elements and your own portlet for testing with GlassFish.

References

GlassFish Application Server

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