WebSynergy Wonderland

I did title this blog "Building Portlets for GIS". If you are going to build portlets you need to have a portal, right? We look for Open Source software on our project and it was decided that WebSynergy would be the portlet sandbox that would host our GIS portlets. You thought I was a newbie with Open Layers, didn't you? I started this venture just as ignorant about portals as I was about Open Source JavaScript libraries for displaying map data. Here, though, I don't have to feel as alone in my ignorance. There are many users of Open Layers out there but WebSynergy is pretty much unknown territory for everyone but a few Sun engineers and companies in Germany or other foreign lands (judging from postings on the forums). It rides upon the GlassFish server, which is also not exactly widely used.

One of the events at the Northern Virginia Software Symposium 2 weeks ago was a panel discussion, attended by several hundred Java web developers. Before kicking off the panel discussion the host took an informal "show of hands" survey of the audience to ask folks what servers and development IDEs they were using. More than half were Weblogic, lots of JBoss, some WebSphere, etc. Remember, this is an audience of Java developers so we don't even mention SharePoint. But, then, almost as an afterthought, the host says "Oh, well, GlassFish, no one's using that, right?" Do you think I was about to raise my hand--no way.

So I'll admit it here to an imaginary audience. I've been struggling for months trying to install and learn the rapidly changing versions of GlassFish on my company-issued IBM ThinkPad laptop running Windows XP Professional. I've learned a lot about port conflicts because the different versions I needed to keep for continued testing always want to use the same ports. Then when you want to install the rapidly changing versions of NetBeans and plug-ins for Portlet Container and WSRP so that they match the versions of the server things get really confusing.

We finally got a Virtual Machine running Solaris and the system administrator loaded WebSynergy on that. But I had too many problems understanding how to interact with it and decided I should have a WebSynergy sandbox version of my own. Rather than keep cluttering up my work laptop and losing the ability to develop with the GlassFish and PC tools that I was getting somewhat comfortable, with I decided I would install WebSynergy on my Dell laptop. Ha Ha. Its OS is Windows Vista. And, unfortunately, Vista Basic, not Vista Professional. WebSynergy does run on it, but it's dog-slow. I make sure I have another task at hand to work on whenever I bring up the NetBeans 6.5 Beta with the WebSynergy instance I finally got working on my Dell laptop. That way I'll have something to do after I click an icon or button besides stare at the little revolving circle that replaces the spinning hourglass as Windows huffs and puffs along on the Dell laptop that also suffers from having only 1 GB of RAM.

After many laborious hours I finally figured out how I could create a portlet with an OpenLayers map on NetBeans 6.5 Beta and display it on the WebSynergy running on my laptop. Next step, theoretically, is to take the WAR file that NetBeans creates and upload it to the remote WebSynergy. I found an admin portlet that enabled me to do the upload. There was a message that the file was uploaded successfully and the portlet was being installed. The file was listed with a number of other installed portlets within the admin portlet. But the menu listing that allows you to add the portlet as an application, making it visible on a page in its own window, did not have my portlet anywhere on it. There was no way I could get my portlet with an OpenLayers map displayed on WebSynergy. The system administrator and the forums could provide no guidance.

During the course of troubleshooting another problem, though, I did get some information from one of the forums. We were told that our version of WebSynergy was not the latest version! Don't ask me how that happened so fast. Before we had time to get comfortable with the Stable Build 2 version that had come out the end of August to replace the beta version there was already a new version. That version is now being installed on the virtual machine and then I will start my tests over again. Plus I have to ponder if I want to go through yet another go-round of uninstall/reinstall on my hopelessly slow Dell laptop so I will have a matching version in my sandbox.