portal

Recently I oversaw an internal development effort to integrate Vivisimo's Velocity search engine into Microsoft SharePoint and JBoss Portal.  CapTech has experience with several search products and many have the same integration challenges.  We found that Velocity's architecture simplifies or eliminates many of these challenges.  Here are just a few great features that we leveraged in this project.

Thanks to Andy Pemberton for helping me with this one.  It definitely had me confused for a couple days.  This issue is specific to IE and only presents itself when you are exposing your portal over HTTP, but are accessing through an HTTPS load balancer or web server.  The result is a mixed content popup from IE everytime you access a page.  This is caused by an iframe shim being inserted by WebLogic portal for the automatic menu navigation.  The fix is easy and straightforward, but finding the solution was not as easy.

To fix this issue, navigate in your Portal Web project to the Merged Project Content "virtual" directory in Eclipse which should be directly under the Portal Web project when viewing in the Portal perspective.  Under that directory, navigate to framework -> skins -> bighorn -> msie.  Right-

If you have ever created a WebLogic Portal domain, you are aware that the Domain Wizard automatically creates your Portal Database schema.  This is very nice if you are a developer or are new to the product, as it allows most anyone to create a fully functional Portal domain in minutes.  However, this is not a long term solution for building out multiple environments with a repeatable and scripted process. 

WebLogic Portal comes with all the necessary SQL scripts to create the required DB resources.  However, it unfortunately does not provide clear documentation on how to leverage these scripts, nor does Oracle provide a master SQL script for executing the provided SQL scripts in the correct order.

I am going provide the steps to create this master SQL script for any supported WebLogic Portal DB.  Also, I will provide the steps for the Oracle DB, you can easily adapt these for any supported DB.  For the purpose

I am officially kicking off a WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions series of blogs.  I am focusing on WebLogic Portal 10.x because it seems to lack the depth of documentation and examples that BEA has produced in the past and the product is bigger than ever.  As I have witnessed at my clients, this has led to unnecessary frustration and confusion.  My goal is to address some of the more common challenges I have seen and provide simple solutions.  I will primarily address issues I have seen cause frustration at multiple clients as they should pertain to a wider audience. 

I plan on starting my series with the following topics:

WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions - Database Scripts and Setup
WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions - HTTP/HTTPS Mixed Content Issue
WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions - Portal Admin Console Session Affinity
WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions - Proper DataSource Configurations
WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions - Authentication vs.

Spring Source pushed the first release candidate of Spring 3 a little more than a month ago; it took a little longer than expected, but nonetheless I've been waiting on this release to play around with the new Portlet MVC features.

For portlet developers, the most notable enhancements are in the support for the Portlet 2.0 spec (JSR286), primarily offered through a new set of portlet-specific annotations. There are also various enhancements to Spring Core and Web MVC that will be useful on portal projects and standard java web projects.

I've built an example portlet application to show off some of these new features; it's downloadable below as a deployable WAR (tested on JBoss Portal 2.7.2) and a mavenized eclipse project (zip). 

After being involved with recent Alfresco-based enterprise portals, Iʼve begun reflecting on best practices in regards to integration with the popular open-source CMS.  This article describes some learnings on integrating Alfrescoʼs Document Management (DM) and Web Content Management (WCM) repositories with an enterprise portal.

In order to provide searching within the portal a strategy had to be defined with how to integrate Alfresco with GSA. There were two approaches considered:

1. Utilize the traditional approach and have GSA crawl Alfresco through either a webscript mechanism or via CIFS.

2. Utilize the GSA Feed based approach.

After careful review we decided upon the feed base approach for the following reasons:

1. Meta Data: In order to support the Faceted searching, we need to find a way to attach metadata to each content item. Given that our HTML code is just snippets and does not contain a header with this information and that we are indexing documents, the only way to reliably accomplish this was via the feed.

On my current project, we are using Alfresco and working on an integration with JBoss Portal. In this case we were building a component that allowed for the browsing, uploading, moving, renaming, and deleting of files. We had built all the Alfresco Web Scripts to support these operations. In order to ensure the proper auditing of the changes, we needed to implement a WebScripts component that performed impersonation of the user that was executing the action. After some Google searching, we found the following common solution to the problem:

public String impersonate(String username) {
String currentUser = AuthenticationUtil.getCurrentUserName();

It always bothered me that the JSR168 <portlet:actionURL /> and <portlet:renderURL /> tags didn’t encode their HTML character entities. The lack of encoding causes your HTML 4 or XHTML 1 markup to fail automated validation. After flipping through a bit more of the JSR286 spec, it mentions that in JSR168 “the behavior in regards to XML escaping URLs written by the tag library was undefined” 1. So, some vendors may have encoded and some may not have (as of 2.7 JBoss Portal, for example, does not).

I thought I’d throw together a quick precursor to another post I plan on finishing in the next few days. This post is about portlets - or, how to structure the HTML markup for a JSR168/JSR286 portlet, to be more specific.