Pluto Server Plug-in 1st beta of 1.0.0 released

This past weekend I created a 1.0.0.b1 release of the Eclipse Pluto Server Plug-in. Biggest change is that I got rid of the hack I had in there using Maven to download the Pluto ant task and dependencies needed to publish a portlet to Pluto. I now bundle the ant task jar and its dependencies with the plug-in (a topic for a future post). Having Maven do the download was something that would work most times but had problems. For example, some users have not been able to get the plug-in to work with a proxy server setup (see issue #3).

It likely won't get picked up as an update in Eclipse; you'll need to go into the Update Manager and install it as a new feature. And don't forget to use http://pluto-server-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/pluto.server.update as your update site. If you try it out, let me know. I'd like to make the 1.0.0 release soon.

Could not publish to server NPE bug fixed!

I finally had some time to sit down and try to figure out the "Could not publish to server NPE bug". Turns out to be a bug in WTP 2.0.2, bug #219627. The WTP team released a patch and then later they made a full 2.0.3 release. However, if you download the latest version of Eclipse Europa (for JEE), it still has the older 2.0.2 version of WTP. Which I believe explains why there have been so many reports of this problem.

So the fix is to run the update manager in Eclipse and get the most recent updates for WTP. I confirmed this by reverting my Eclipse config to WTP 2.0.2 and was able to reliably reproduce the issue. Reverting back to WTP 2.0.3 got the deploy to Pluto working again.

I added a FAQ page for the project with a FAQ also explaining the issue. I also verified that the Pluto server plug-in works in Ganymede.

Many thanks to campi, by the way. I basically ran a Google search based on the stack trace campi posted to find others who had run into the same issue but with a different plug-in. And that eventually got me to the Eclipse bug and the resolution.

Eclipse Pluto Server Plug-in, v. 0.2.5 (now on Google Code)

Just finished moving the Pluto Server Plug-in code over to its own project page, pluto-server-plugin, on Google Code. I created a new minor release, v. 0.2.5, just to switch over the update site to the one on Google Code. Switching over a plug-in's update site took some experimentation, but here's how I did it (for future reference and for anyone else needing to change a plug-in's update site)

1. Change the Update Site URL for the Feature to the new update site.
   
2. Bump the Feature version and do a new release to the old site. Users with an older release of the plug-in will get the update which will point them to the new update site for future releases.
3. Change the Update Site URL in the Update Site's site.xml file. Publish the update site to the new update site location.

So hopefully it will be a seamless update for Pluto Server Plug-in users.

Pluto Server Plug-in: Could not publish to server NPE bug

Some users of the Pluto server plug-in have had trouble getting a simple plug-in to deploy. They receive an error message:

Could not publish to the server.
java.lang.NullPointerException

Unfortunately, I've not been able to recreate the "Could not publish to the server" error. I have created a new, clean Eclipse workspace and install, and went through the tutorial and it all still works.

For those who are experiencing problems, I've added a test portlet eclipse project that you can import and try to deploy to Pluto. Some other troubleshooting ideas

• Make sure that you have a portlet.xml along with your portlet code. That will be necessary. See the eclipse project above for a simple example.
• When first doing the deploy, you'll need to be connected to the internet so that the Maven ant tasks can download the pluto dependencies. This is only required the first time you use the plug-in to deploy to a pluto server.
  
• Check ECLIPSE_WORKSPACE/.metadata/.log. It may have more details regarding the exact nature of the error. If you find anything, please do share it with me; I'd love to get to the bottom of this bug.

In other Pluto Server Plug-in related business, I hope to have the code moved over to Google Code sometime this month.

Pluto Server Plug-in Screencast Posted

Just finished the screencast promised for the Pluto Server Plug-in. It's fairly simple, goes through installing the plug-in and then creating a simple "hello world" type portlet and deploying and displaying it in Pluto.

Unfortunately, the size of the screencast, produced with Wink, comes it at a little over 10MB. I need to figure out how to keep these guys from getting so bloated. Using color palette now, has reduced the file size to just under 5MB.

Eclipse Pluto Server Plug-in, v. 0.2.4

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.