uPortal IRC Logs-2008-04-04

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[10:06:57 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> EricDalquist: do you have any good maven resources to recommend? I understand how to build projects and all that, but i'm not sure how we're going to handle deployment
[10:07:29 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right now we use ant scripts to overlay configuration files as we build the war
[10:07:35 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> and then just deploy that with tomcat manager
[10:07:43 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> hrm, Elliot is usually the one with the references ... I use the maven site a lot and unfortunately a lot is just time using it :/
[10:07:58 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> but i'm not sure how to handle all that in maven, and we need to figure out how and where to use the ant deployPortletApp task too
[10:08:00 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> right, that sounds similar to what we do right now
[10:08:07 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:08:17 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> and for our initial upgrade we're going to stick with it
[10:08:29 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> since up3 still provides an ant script to call all the functions
[10:08:38 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah, that makes sense
[10:08:55 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'm just not sure about the portlet deployment piece
[10:09:01 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> ah
[10:09:04 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> the portlets we have now are built with ant, not maven
[10:09:15 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> well you can continue to deploy them as you have been
[10:09:18 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> and the web.xml is edited for uportal so we don't use the portlet deployment task
[10:09:24 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> ah
[10:09:26 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah
[10:09:32 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> well, to be in sync with the jasig repository we need to use maven
[10:09:34 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> and the web.xml for up2 is not the same as that for up3
[10:09:38 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:09:55 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> our ant build system builds all the portlets then calls deployPortletApp on each
[10:10:06 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> I do have some ideas about a maven only deployment setup that I think would work well
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[10:10:16 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> but right now it is mainly just notes and nothing actually tested
[10:10:21 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i've noticed it does some overlays too
[10:10:35 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> although i'm not sure how you'd use different ones for different environments
[10:10:38 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> ah
[10:10:50 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> so, here is the pitch for a maven only build system
[10:11:21 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> you build generic versions of all of your webapps and deploy them to a local maven repository
[10:11:44 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> these either have dev specific config or just generic config settings
[10:12:17 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> then for each environment you have a maven project
[10:12:44 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> similar to up3 it has an ear module, and an overlays module, under the overlays module you have a module for each WAR in your portal
[10:13:02 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> in the overlay for each WAR you have the config file specific to the environment for this maven project
[10:13:19 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> so this environment specific maven project likely has no code, just a bunch of pom files and config files
[10:13:24 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> that makes sense
[10:13:31 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> would you actually run a maven build on production?
[10:13:38 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> running 'mvn package' on the project would grab all of your generic WARs, overlay your config, build the EAR
[10:13:39 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> or get that project to just package things?
[10:13:50 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> the only annoying part of this right now is there is no EAR overlay functionality
[10:13:54 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:14:16 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> so you have to reproduce the uportal EAR
[10:14:18 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> pom
[10:15:03 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> so to do a prod build you would run 'mvn clean package'
[10:15:15 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah that seems pretty rational
[10:15:16 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> then have some ant task that deploys the resulting EAR to tomcat
[10:15:28 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> plus you don't need to do any pluto specific stuff
[10:15:34 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right
[10:15:38 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> since pluto has a maven plugin which gets applied during the overlay
[10:16:03 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> then to move a new version of portlet A into prod you just edit the prod pom.xml and update the version number
[10:16:33 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> and you're no longer compiling for specific environments, compile once to make the artifact then move that exact same code through
[10:17:06 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right
[10:17:16 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> sounds good to me
[10:17:48 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah, I'd really like to get there but we're going to do the up3 upgrade with our existing build scripts
[10:17:56 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> then look and switching to this new build process
[10:18:16 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> especially since our current process will not work on SVN with the way we use tags
[10:18:55 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> ah
[10:19:05 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah i'd be all for just doing something similar to what we'd been doing
[10:19:12 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> as i think other people would be
[10:19:15 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> at least for the time being
[10:19:21 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah
[10:19:23 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'm just not sure how to handle the portlet side of things
[10:19:32 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> that was the biggest motivation for all the work that went into the up3 build.xml
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[10:19:44 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i guess maybe look at creating an ant script for each portlet?
[10:19:47 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> well, it sounds like you'll either need to update the web.xml for all of your portlets
[10:20:00 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah that might be the thing to do for the time being
[10:20:00 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> or remove it and add something to the build process to call deployPortletApp
[10:20:15 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> can deployportletapp just build a war instead of actually deploying it?
[10:20:34 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> um, you could tweak the uportal build.xml to do that
[10:21:07 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i mean to be able to build each portlet with various configuration file sets
[10:21:09 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> if you take a look at the ant target it has quite a few options and really it is just calling the pluto assembler and giving it a source WAR and a destination location
[10:21:21 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> ah ok
[10:21:23 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> sounds good
[10:21:29 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'll look into both those thigns
[10:21:32 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist>
[10:21:59 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'd like to leave everything in a state where we're mostly in sync with the jasig portlet repository, but people can still build updates reliably
[10:22:26 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah, that makes sense
[10:22:48 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> eventually I'd like to see up3 at the point where you don't even need a vendor branch
[10:22:56 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> you can just create a local uPortal WAR overlay
[10:23:08 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> which depends on the uPortal x.y.z WAR
[10:23:36 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:23:41 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i've had that thought too
[10:24:12 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> particularly for some of the smaller portlets, where we don't really have much local modification
[10:24:45 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yup
[10:25:10 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> it would be neat to see JA-SIG be able to provide some fairly standard docs about this approach too
[10:25:14 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> since it should work for most everyone
[10:25:31 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:25:33 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> absolutely
[10:26:17 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i keep trying to tell everyone that everything will be ok with me gone because we're using standard technologies like svn and maven and portletmvc, and even if you don't have personal expertise with it, someone else in the building will
[10:26:45 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> not like some of the older stuff that's very specific to uportal
[10:27:07 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah
[10:27:16 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> its funny how hard that argument can be
[10:27:26 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> we're working on getting more things standardized here
[10:27:53 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> the mind set of 'well it is just faster to hack it together custom' is quite prevalent ... which of course turns into a maintenance nightmare
[10:27:59 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:28:03 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i love spring
[10:28:29 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i really think spring portletmvc is the big reason to write portlets rather than channels
[10:28:36 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> having a standard technology is just such a win
[10:28:39 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah
[10:28:46 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> same here
[10:28:48 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> especially since it's such an easy transition from servletmvc to portletmvc
[10:28:59 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> you can start writing code really quickly, without having to delve into up internals
[10:29:02 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> which is the way it should be
[10:29:34 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist>
[10:30:40 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yea, crossing off tasks
[10:30:50 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> oh i added the yale skin last ngiht
[10:31:03 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah saw that commit, I'll have to check it out today
[10:31:11 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> it will be nice that our skin picker will have more than one option
[10:31:11 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> although there's still something weird about the skin chooser
[10:31:26 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> to actually pick a different one you'll have to drag down the bottom bar of the dialog box to get to the buttons
[10:31:30 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'm still trying to fix that
[10:31:33 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yes, i thought so too
[10:32:03 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i included the yale images rather than the famfam ones for that too
[10:32:17 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> so it's a good demo for showing that you can even easily replace all the icons just with css
[10:32:23 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> which wasn't so easy in 2.6
[10:32:50 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> it'd be great if some other schools could eventually contribute some other skins too
[10:32:58 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> or at least de-branded versions
[10:33:01 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yup
[10:45:09 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> so i'm wondering if we should just change the theme to always import jquery if USE_AJAX is turned on
[10:45:18 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right now i think it's only used for authenticated users
[10:45:32 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> does that cause issues for guests?
[10:45:39 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> but i worry that it'll make it hard for portlets, since we might or might not be already importing the library
[10:45:51 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> right now? no, since they can't edit anything
[10:46:37 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> hrm
[10:46:44 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah this is going to be a hard part with portlets and JS
[10:46:51 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah i've been thinking about that
[10:47:00 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> it's why i haven't ajaxified any of the portlets in svn yet
[10:47:03 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> since really a portlet should include an JS it needs
[10:47:10 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> but it has no idea what the rest of the portal is doing
[10:47:12 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[10:47:23 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i suppose we could make it a configuration parameter
[10:47:29 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yeah
[10:47:31 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> that sounds good
[10:47:36 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> includejQuery or whatever and default it to true
[10:48:43 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> also, we'll probably end of needing something similar to decide whether to import the css resources or not
[10:49:00 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> since if you're running it in up3 you don't want to accidentally override the stuff that's included by the theme
[10:49:11 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> since that stuff nicely switches when you change the skin
[10:50:05 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yup
[10:55:01 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> argh, somehow i deleted the perspective switching button from my eclipse
[10:55:06 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> come back . . .
[10:56:37 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> ok, apparently a restart helps
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[15:06:16 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> hey EricDalquist - do you have any thoughts on the bookmarks portlet functionality?
[15:06:28 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> ?
[15:06:36 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> sorry, context is helpful
[15:06:51 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i finally sent that email out about the stuff yale added to read remote URLs of bookmarks
[15:07:07 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> ah
[15:07:07 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> seems like others are interested, but i want to make sure we don't break the current stuff
[15:07:57 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> hrm I must have completely missed that email
[15:08:06 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> think i sent it to portlet-dev
[15:08:20 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i probably should have ccd the bookmarks list, come to think of it
[15:08:27 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> I wonder if I forgot to subscribe to that
[15:08:28 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> not sure i'm even on that list - i tend to forget it has it's own
[15:08:30 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> I probably did
[15:08:32 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> ooh
[15:08:33 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> lol
[15:08:37 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah join the fun!
[15:08:42 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> actually there hasn't been much traffic
[15:08:49 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> wow yeah
[15:09:04 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> I need to go add this... I'll read the archives and respond
[15:09:05 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> i'm hoping to make the calendar and feedback portlets stable enough that we can call them released soon though
[15:09:09 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> lol ok
[15:09:13 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> thanks
[15:09:13 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> though it may not happen today, my brain is pretty fried
[15:09:19 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> nah no rush
[15:09:19 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> very cool
[15:09:50 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> mostly i'm just trying to get everything organized, and commit anything that deserves committing
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[15:20:40 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> argh.
[15:21:01 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> the group IDs changed so now i'm going to have to start taking that into account for those portlet security-role-ref mappings
[15:21:30 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> oh yeah :/
[15:21:35 EDT(-0400)] <athena7>
[15:21:49 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> we really need a non-synthetic unique key for more things in the portal
[15:21:50 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> it's kind of a shame because it means we can't have these portlets just magically completely work
[15:21:52 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> yeah
[15:21:58 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> and on that note we need to make fname truly uniqe
[15:22:03 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> but it's better not to be relying on an id like that
[15:22:05 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> is it not?
[15:22:08 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> nope
[15:22:13 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> aiee
[15:22:19 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> the portal works just fine if you have multiple channels with the same fname
[15:22:26 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> oh
[15:22:28 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> it grabs the one with the newest publish date
[15:22:33 EDT(-0400)] <athena7> that's confusing
[15:22:36 EDT(-0400)] <EricDalquist> yup
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