Recommendations for Development Environment

[Randy May]

Everyone,

We have ventured down the JSR-168 portlet path (with the intention of moving to JSR-286 portlets in the future), using Spring MVC as the backbone. I am wondering if I can get some recommendations regarding the best Development Environment to use. I want to make sure the following is preserved:

Portlets (& code) are pure JSR-168

Full deploy / Hot Deploy is available

Full debug capability

Use of Open Source Software is preferred

Currently, we are using MyEclipse deploying to Liferay, but it appears the only way to get full featured Hot Deploy through Liferay is to use their Development Environment. I have read that Lomboz / eXo allows for Hot Deploy, but it appears only to deploy, not to debug.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Randy

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

What's your definition of the 'hot deploy' idea? Is this a development time or production time hot deploy? How 'hot' is hot?

Many of the features taken for granted in the J2EE environment are sadly lacking for Portal Servers and Portal Development environments.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Randy May]

I am purely referring to Development. MyEclipse came out with a wizard to create a Portlet, but this is no where near sufficient. I am trying to get as close as possible to the traditional J2EE Development Environment (i.e. MyEclipse running and synchronizing a Tomcat server) as possible.

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

Things get tough with Portal. Implementations are different, but Portal is like a whole extra web app running on top of the app server itself. Hot deploy gets tricky.

One thing you might be interested in adding to your arsenal is JSF. You can develop applications as JSF apps, and take advantage of full, JSF 'hot deploy capabilities' that you would expect, and then just wrap those JSF apps in a 'portlet bridge' and deploy the app to the portal. It gives you the best of both worlds - full access to the JSF framework and all of the goodies that go along with it, but at the same time, the ability to seamlessly deploy to a portal environment.

Just an idea.

-Cameron McKenzie

[Randy May]

I appreciate the suggestion.

We have decided on ExtJS (even though JavaScript is not recommended for Portlets) for our UI. It's hot deploying the JavaScript files that is the biggest challenge right now. We are getting around it by building the JavaScript in a traditional web app, and then moving it to a Portlet.

Thanks,

[Cameron Wallace McKenzie]

>>even though JavaScript is not recommended for Portlets

JSF Portlets use JavaScript like crazy! Don't fret too much. Just remember that JavaScript needs to be 'namespace encoded' to avoid collisions. But it shouldn't prove to be much of a limitation. I hope not, anyways.

Happy Portal!

-Cameron McKenzie