Spring Portlet MVC Seminar
- John A. Lewis
Spring Portlet MVC Seminar
John A. Lewis, Unicon Inc.
Cris Holdorph, Unicon Inc.
We are getting excited about the Spring Portlet MVC Seminars coming up this Sunday at the JA-SIG Conference – we hope you are too. We have a lot of great material we are planning to cover during these sessions and we think you will really enjoy it. We are planning to do a fair amount of practical demonstration with real source code. While we won't necessarily be doing full programming exercises during the seminars (simply due to time constraints) we do want you to get to work with the code samples on your own machines. This will include editing, compiling, deploying, testing, and using the code yourselves.
Prerequisite Activities
In these kinds of workshops, getting the development environments of all the participants set up correctly can be very time-consuming and this will reduce the amount of time we can spend on the actual seminar material. In order to reduce this "setup time" as much as possible, we ask – nay we beg – that you follow these instructions before you leave for the conference. For those of you that are only participating in the advanced session, it is absolutely essential that you do this because we won't be stopping for development environment setup again in the afternoon.
Software Setup
Java 5 or 6 JDK - You must have a working Java 5 or Java 6 JDK installed – any specific version should be fine, but the later the better. You should have the JAVA_HOME environment variable set correctly and the binaries from $JAVA_HOME/bin should be on your path. Windows and Linux users can download Sun JDK 6 here. MacOS X users can download Sun JDK 5 here (sorry, no JDK 6 for you yet!). Also, some Linux distributions (like Ubuntu) have the Sun JDK available through the normal package management system.
Maven 2 - You must have a working installation of the command-line Maven 2 utility. Download and installation instructions are on the Maven website. From the command line of your operating system you should be able to run 'mvn -v' and you should get a response that begins with something like this:
Maven version: 2.0.9 Java version: 1.6.0_06
If that works, then you have both Java and Maven installed and working.
Eclipse 3.3 - In order to explore the code easily, we recommend that you install the "Eclipse 3.3 IDE for Java EE Developers" distribution available for download at the Eclipse website. To properly edit and build the sample project in Eclipse, you also need to install the following two plugins via the 'Software Updates' feature available in the Help menu:
- M2Eclipse (Maven Integration)
- Eclipse Update Site URL: http://m2eclipse.sonatype.org/update/ (add as "New Remote Site")
- Feature to install: Maven Integration - Maven Integration for Eclipse
- SpringIDE (Spring Framework Integration)
- Eclipse Update Site URL: http://springide.org/updatesite/ (add as "New Remote Site")
- Feature to install: Core - Spring IDE Bean Support
If you try to install other features, you may get errors based on not having all the dependencies installed. Feel free to install other features and their dependencies if you wish, but at least make sure you have the above two items properly installed.
Pluto 1.1.5 Portal Driver - We will use the Pluto Portal Driver as a simple server for hosting our sample portlets. We've prepared a download of the Pluto 1.1.5 Portal Driver bundled with Tomcat 5.5.26. Please download this bundle and unzip it into your workspace.
Spring Portlet MVC Sample Applications - Finally, download the sample applications. Unzip this into your workspace directory. One at a time, go into each directory ("sample1" through "sample6"), and run the command "mvn package". This will take a while the first time as Maven downloads all the dependencies for building and deploying the application. It is critical that you do this before the seminar since these downloads can take a while, especially over a slow Internet connection. At the end you should see a message that says "BUILD SUCCESSFUL". You can then run this command again and it should only take about 15 seconds with all the dependencies already in place.
Background Reading
If you aren't already fairly familiar with both JSR 168 Portlets and with the Spring Framework, it will be helpful to do a bit of reading ahead of time build up the context for the material in these seminars. Here are some suggested reading items to get up to speed on these topics:
JSR-168 Portlets:
- Introduction to JSR 168 - The Portlet Specification from Sun
- The JSR 168 Portlet FAQ at java.net
Spring Framework:
- Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection Pattern by Martin Fowler
- Introduction to the Spring Framework by Rod Johnson
- The Spring Framework Reference Documentation: Chapter 1. Introduction
Okay, that's a lot to do before Sunday, but as the old saying goes, "the more you put into it, the more you'll get out of it."
Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or problems. See you Sunday in St. Paul!