Still here building portlets

Yes, I know, it's been awhile, but I'm still here building portlets. I got sidetracked by other work assignments. The side trip involved working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, MOSS, for short. It was an interesting comparision to the world of Sun and Open Source. I did get to attend a very good training class (http://www.tedpattison.net/Courses/SPT401.aspx). But my project has no funds for an MSDN license. You can't do any development work with the application unless you purchase the MSDN license. So the company foots the bill for my training but the project has no funds for development resources--go figure.

Back to the world of open source. Thank goodness, development platforms are free, but, of course, you pay the price by not having access to support when you need it. I guess where I left off here with my last post I had been struggling with the NetBeans IDE. Awhile after that, I remember I had another issue with NetBeans. That one got posted Jan 28 (http://www.nabble.com/NetBeans-6.5-JavaScript-Debugger-Firefox-2.0.0.x-to21713322.html#a21713322) but still isn't answered. I vaguely remember someone helped me find out what I needed to know by using Firebug.

Over the last couple of months I did deploy some GIS portlets to our VM server (http://12.187.20.146:8080/portletdriver/dt). Not very pretty, but they do prove the concept. And from my laptop I am able to consume the portlet that is a WSRP producer on the VM. What I need to do next is get back to experimenting with the next generation WebSynergy, now called Web Space Server. I'd like to get it installed on my laptop. I remember the problems I encountered with port conflicts because I had 2 versions of GlassFish plus the WebSynergy GlassFish installed on the laptop.

I opened 3 console windows this morning on my laptop and did an asadmin start-domain command for each of the 3 servers--wanted to see if all 3 were still functional and what ports they were listening on. The GlassFish v2ur1 and v2ur2 both give a nice output in the console window that tells you where the server log is being written to and what 7 ports the server listens on. When I started WebSynergy I immediately remembered one of the many frustrations I had with it--it gives absolutely no output in the console window except the cryptic "Command start-domain executed successfully." I'll have to go digging again for the server log and if I remember correctly even the server log doesn't provide much information about port numbers. I can see from accessing it in the browser that I used 8585 for the http, but I know there are others in there somewhere that conflict with what the 2 GlassFish servers use. Should hopefully be in my notes.

Once I get that figured out I think the next step will be to remove/delete (it's never clear on these open source things how you undo the installation) the WebSynergy. Then I can use whatever ports I had been using for that and try to install Web Space Server to use those ports. Let the fun begin.