Liferay 5.0.1 with Tomcat bundle

Why did I choose the Tomcat bundle?

First, unarguably Tomcat is the most popular application server in the planet.
One of the SpringSource guys told me that based on survey, around 80% of the Spring framework
deployment are in Tomcat. There are lots of application currently in production that uses
Tomcat.

Second, that is what the Liferay 4.4 documentation suggest for the development.
(Sadly enough, currently there is no Liferay 5.0.1 documentation...)

Become a bit different from the manual, I choose PostgreSQL 8.2 as my development database instead of MySQL as suggested by Liferay manual. pgAdminIII 1.6.3 feels handy right here.

What you need to do with PostgreSQL is:

Copy the JDBC driver from PostgreSQL installation to the Tomcat library folder.
In my machine I copied from [C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.2\jdbc\postgresql-8.2-506.jdbc4.jar]
to my [d:\opt\liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1\shared\lib] folder.

I edit the d:\opt\liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1\conf\Catalina\localhost\ROOT.xml
Comment out the tag for MySQL, uncomment and adapt the PostgreSQL section.
For my machine, it was setup like this. You might need to adapt to your own database setting.

<resource
name="jdbc/LiferayPool"
auth="Container"
type="javax.sql.DataSource"
driverClassName="org.postgresql.Driver"
url="jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/lportal"
username="lportal_client"
password="liferay"
maxActive="20"
/>

Remember that some default configuration of PostgreSQL installation disabled the TCP/IP access
to database. You need to enable that, and also you might need to grant permission to where the
TCP/IP client located (in this case your Tomcat application server).

As suggested by the manual, Liferay will do the magic when you change the database, provided
sufficient rights to access the new database. Of course the magic takes some time to perform.

Access the web browser on the url [http://localhost:8080/]. It will display this screen:

Login using:
user: test@liferay.com
pass: test
Click on the [Sign in] button.

The sample page will show you a form asking you to agree/disagree with the Terms and Conditions.

If you get this far that means that you have succeeded setting up a fresh Liferay installation with the database for development.
Good job!

Liferay 5.0.1 Up and Running

Yesterday I attended the Liferay Intalio - Join Event, at Hilton Orchard Hotel Singapore.
The presentation itself was very short, but the cocktail is surprisingly quite long. I met great people here.

I believe Liferay is the fastest growing community on open source portal, and has been picking up very well and gaining reputable recognition.

Intalio is also an open source product in a niche market which has gained reputable recognition it its own niche market.

Today I downloaded the latest Liferay 5.0.1 bundled with Tomcat 5.5 from this link:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lportal/liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1.zip

I personally still prefer to use the Tomcat 5.5 rather than Tomcat 6.0, not because I'm a slow adapter of this latest app server, but because I found it quite problematic to deploy on Tomcat 6.0. This happens when I was working with a Struts application at my work. Something strange things happened, and Tomcat 6.0 does not show anything. After hours of finding out, I decided to give a try to deploy on Tomcat 5.5, which gave a thorough error message about deployment. It might be because of something the way Tomcat changes the logger between 5.5 and 6.0 which I haven't had time to explore much.

As expected the downloaded bundle works very well with my laptop environment.
I used JDK 5 to run it.

These are the steps needed to make the Liferay 5.0.1 running on my machine:

1. Extract the file to a folder (mine is [d:\opt\liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1])


2. Set environment variable CATALINA_HOME to point to [d:\opt\liferay-portal-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1]


3. Set your CLASSPATH, JAVA_HOME and PATH environment variables


4. Run Tomcat 5.5 from the command line using "d:\opt\liferay-tomcat-5.5-5.0.1\bin\startup.bat"


5. Watch the messages


6. Test if it works by opening through your browser this url: http://localhost:8080/

AquaLogic Portal and WebLogic Portal

The event of Oracle Corp (NASQ: ORCL) bidded price on BEA Systems, Inc (NASQ: BEAS) has raised some users' eye brows.

This time I read and found out that the AquaLogic set of products were actually the PlumTree products which was bought by BEA Systems, Inc on 2005. BEA Systems made a major rebranding of the products as AquaLogic, with AquaLogic User Interface (ALUI) actually a complete, more mature, service oriented based, portal solution. AquaLogic was positioned as SOA based portal solution because it is not just involving Java technology instead it could be integrated with other platforms such as .NET technology.

The WebLogic Portal (WLP) gives illusion that this is the best portal product of BEA Systems' line of products, but I seemed the AquaLogic is somehow a better product than WLP. I haven't dug it well enough into the ALUI, but my experience with WLP has shown that it has a steeper learning curve. WLP technology is not just simply easy to use out-of-the-box.

Oracle Corp now keep adding more and more middleware products from the companies it buys. Some of them intersected each other. Some other obviously overlapped. When there are 2 products of the same kind within the same company, one must die. While ALUI and WLP still co-exist, the acquisition by Oracle, if it really happens would have created a company with overcrowded portofolio of enterprise portals. Then, 3 out of the 4 must die slowly?!? 

Let's watch for the Survival of The Fittest game once again...

WebLogic 10.0 Users: Apply Critical Patch

BEA has identified a problem that affects all BEA WebLogic Server 10, BEA Workshop for WebLogic Platform 10, and BEA WebLogic Portal 10 users. The problem is caused by an erroneous license check against an internal license file that will expire on May 14, 2007.

BEA has addressed this problem. Two solutions are available:

• A patch for existing WebLogic 10 installations, and
  


• Updated installers

The patch is available from the BEA Patch Repository; the Patch ID is 2VJT.

Until a solution is applied, the implications of this problem are as follows:

• If you attempt to boot a WebLogic Server 10 or WebLogic Portal 10 server prior to May 14, you will receive a warning that "sales@bea.com for information on extending your license.>".


• If you attempt to boot a WebLogic Server 10 or WebLogic Portal 10 server on May 14 or afterwards, the server will not boot.


• If you have booted a WebLogic Server 10 or WebLogic Portal 10 server prior to May 14, it will continue to run past May 14. However after May 14, attempts to make policy changes in the console will fail, and the server cannot be rebooted after May 14.

Please monitor http://support.bea.com for updates on this problem.