Going Back and Going Forward

I've given up on getting an answer on the forum to my problem with not being able to deploy portlets to the Web Space Server instance running on the Solaris VM. I went back to working with a portlet I had created several months ago that used an Open Layers map and had a call to a Web Feature Service (WFS) that displayed some National Inventory of Dams (NID) data. There is a lot more that I need to learn about working with WFS clients.

After finally digging up the portlet that was the most current and displaying it on GlassFish, the first problem I encountered was that the point features were not displaying on the map. Investigation revealed that my team had removed the feature data from the virtual server I had been accessing for the NID data. Since that link was somewhat hardcoded in the proxy servlet code my first task would be to rethink the way I created the URL to make it easier to modify for different data sources.

Several email exchanges with the team gave me a URL for a WFS data set similar to the NID that I could fairly easily replace in the portlet code. This data is a feature set representing World Port Index (WPI) location points. During the course of making the code changes I encountered a problem that I had managed to avoid dealing with earlier when I was doing portlets with Open Layers maps. I knew that I would eventually have to start using the portlet namespace taglib because most of the Open Layers examples used the same variable names. And that doesn't work well when you have more than one of the Open Layers portlets displayed on the page. The data was showing up in the wrong divs.

I started the task of adding all the portlet namespace tags but I will now be setting that task aside for at least the next week. I'm attending a 7-day Training Camp class that is designed to prepare me for passing Sun's Certified Java Programmer 6 class. My Java knowledge is definitely not what it needs to be to pass that exam. NetBeans is a great tool for doing the behind-the-scenes Java code that's needed for portlets, but it means that I haven't had much experience or practice with the basics of Java.

I'm going to need to concentrate every brain cell this week on the basics of the Java language. I've started looking at a book with examples of the test questions and I'm dismayed at how deliberately tricky the questions are. I never knew it was possible to make such an intense multiple choice exam--so many "choose all that apply" or "fails to compile" or "exception at runtime" or "prints this" or "prints that." It doesn't test just factual knowledge, you have to understand and think about and trace through the code before you can begin to pick an answer.

The worst that could happen when the end of next week comes and I attempt the test is that I don't pass. But that won't be the end. There's still a year (I think) in which I will be able to continue to study on my own and retake the test again. It's going to be a lot of work but I look forward to having a concrete goal ahead of me, for once, instead of the vagaries of deciding what I should try to make work next with portlets.