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.

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.