NetBeans 6.5 and OpenPortal Portlet Container 2.0

One of the successful portlets I had built when I had been using NetBeans 6.1 made a WFS call and displayed the returned features on an OpenLayers map. I knew that I would be wanting to make some enhancements to that portlet and opened the project in my newly installed 6.5 version of Netbeans. The clean and build was successful but the Run and Deploy wouldn't work.

The Run/Deploy tab of the IDE showed these errors:

Deployment Started
Deployment Failed
C:\Documents and Settings\536116\My Documents\NetBeansProjects\TestWFS\nbproject\build-impl.xml:550: The module has not been deployed.BUILD FAILED (total time: 2 seconds)

Opening up the build-imp.xml file didn't provide any clues as to what might be causing the deployment failure.

The IDE log had a lot of incomprehensible messages related to the portlet. Many of them appeared before the message about the failed deployment of the portlet and were "java.lang.IllegalStateException" messages about trying to access a file from the "default package." There was a recommendation to

Please see http://www.netbeans.org/download/dev/javadoc/org-openide-modules/org/openide/modules/doc-files/classpath.html#default_package

Looking at that web page didn't help. It was obviously outdated, not even having a "default_package" section.

The only thing I could think of was that maybe I hadn't installed everything that was needed for portlet development. Did I need to do some additional plugins or update plugins after going from 6.1 to 6.5? I had installed Portal Pack 2.0 when I was using the earlier NetBeans version. Was I now supposed to install the latest Portal Pack 3.0 M2? I thought I had read somewhere that those plugins were included with the IDE download. I thought I remembered that right after the installation I had gone to the Plugin Manager and enabled 5 plugins related to portlets that were already in the "to be installed" section. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right documentation for portal pack and NetBeans and Portlet Container wondering what I had overlooked. Surely if a portlet was built with NetBeans 6.1 there shouldn't be additional changes needed to import the project into NetBeans 6.5.

Finally I decided that I would do a simple test and build a HelloWorld portlet in NetBeans 6.5. I discovered that the same failure to deploy was occurring. But this time I noticed these errors in the Portlet Container tab:

CLI171 Command deploy failed : Deployment of application failed - Invalid user or password java.lang.Exception: Deployment on Glassfish failed at org.netbeans.modules.portalpack.servers.jnpc.impl.SunAppServerDeployHandler.deployOnGlassFish(SunAppServerDeployHandler.java:103) at org.netbeans.modules.portalpack.servers.jnpc.impl.SunAppServerDeployHandler.deploy(SunAppServerDeployHandler.java:175) at org.netbeans.modules.portalpack.servers.jnpc.impl.JNPCTaskHandler.deploy(JNPCTaskHandler.java:89) at org.netbeans.modules.portalpack.servers.core.PSDeployerImpl.run(PSDeployerImpl.java:148) at org.openide.util.RequestProcessor$Task.run(RequestProcessor.java:572) at org.openide.util.RequestProcessor$Processor.run(RequestProcessor.java:997)PortalPack Message : Deployment Failed : Deployment on Glassfish failed

I went into the properties for Portlet Container and in the Server Config tab found fields for User Name and password. Admin was the User Name that was filled in but password field was blank. Apparently, that was the step that I missed. When I typed in the admin password and applied the change I was then able to deploy the portlet. Back in business for building GIS portlets, but, once again, wondering what documentation I had overlooked that would have explained about the extra configuration step for the Portlet Container.