I've been working on an Eclipse Plug-in recently to provide a server definition for the Pluto portal driver. Let me explain why. To start with, I should say that I've been using Pluto 1.1.x with Eclipse for a while, since it comes bundled with Tomcat, it makes a nice, lightweight rapid development environment for working with portlets. And Pluto keeps getting better. In the latest release (v. 1.1.4), changes to the portal pages and layouts are persisted across server restarts.
Alas, there has always been the annoyance that Eclipse wants to deploy your web application as-is to the server, including the web.xml, and Pluto, like all portal servers, expects special servlet mappings to be in place for portlets in your portlet application. For me this has meant having to rewrite the web.xml for when I want to deploy to Pluto in Eclipse, but then changing it back for when I want to change a servlet definition (or deploy to a different portal server, e.g., GridSphere). So that is the problem that this Eclipse plug-in solves. The web.xml rewriting is taken care of by the plug-in at deployment time.
I've put up a quick web page for those interested. For the impatient, create a new remote site in the update manager with this url: http://www.extreme.indiana.edu/~machrist/projects/pluto-server-plugin/updates
I've started work on a screencast to show how this thing works, and hopefully I'll get that posted next week.
4 comments:
As a committer on Apache Pluto, you can imagine that I am interested in this project. I encourage you to set up a Sourceforge project for this work where you can set up forums for questions and bug tracking facilities that would help move the project forward. If you don't know how to do it, I can help you. This is good work that I'd like to see move forward.
Craig,
Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad to hear there is interest in the project. I was leaning toward setting this project up on google code, but if you feel there is a compelling reason to go with Sourceforge instead, please let me know. I'll get it set up in one place or the other when I get a free moment.
In the mean time, and I know its not ideal, I would encourage anyone with questions or bugs to post a comment to this blog.
Marcus,
Google or Sourceforge are good choices for places to put your code. It's up to you. If the code looks good and you're interested, I could sponsor its move to Pluto. Still, others in the Project Management Committee would need to approve the move. In the meantime, you should get your code in a more visible place.
/Craig
any luck on getting the source on Sourceforge or Google Code yet ?
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