uPortal IRC Logs-2011-04-20

[09:00:05 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> may have found a nasty uportal bug
[09:00:23 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> we're getting a handfull of entries being deleted from up_user every day
[09:00:31 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and every once in a while it is the guest user
[09:00:41 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> which doesn't bode so well for the rest of the portal when that happens
[09:25:19 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> gah ... this layout manager code is scary
[09:27:34 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> You wrote it, didn't you?
[09:27:45 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> hah no
[09:27:54 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> most of this code was written when I was just starting colege
[09:28:01 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Ah
[09:28:09 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> its on our list of things to refactor
[09:28:21 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> every version we update more and more old code
[09:28:30 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> this probably won't get touched until 4.1 though
[09:32:14 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> uPortal is a great product
[09:32:30 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> but it suffers from what any software that has been around for 12+ years does
[09:32:32 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> there is OLD code
[09:33:16 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> stuff that was written before things like Spring even existed
[09:35:49 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> True
[09:36:33 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and the thing is most of it does work and work very well
[09:36:40 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> there are just esoteric bugs some times
[09:36:46 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and unexpected side effects
[09:36:57 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> but that is why we're slowly going through and converting code to use frameworks like spring and hibernate
[09:37:01 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and adding more and more unit tests
[09:37:09 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Yup
[09:37:17 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> we just have to take care to replace related parts of the code together
[09:37:28 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> which is why the layout code has been left until last
[09:37:37 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> it touches A LOT of other bits of uPortal
[09:37:45 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and we needed to get all of those other ones fixed first
[09:38:16 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> So far, my two biggest issues with uPortal have been i18n and the guest stuff.
[09:38:29 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> But I believe you're working on both of them, right?
[09:38:33 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> well those should be mostly fixed in 4.0
[09:38:42 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> we got rid of the special handling for guest layouts
[09:38:49 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and they are treated like all other users now
[09:39:03 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> And they can change their locale?
[09:39:05 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> and jen has done a lot of great work on simplifying the i18n support code
[09:39:07 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> I believe so
[09:39:11 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Great.
[09:39:13 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> we'll need to test that of course
[09:39:17 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> but the intent is that they can
[09:39:21 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Yeah
[09:39:59 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Mainly, we need localization of tab- and channel names/titles.
[09:40:19 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Currently, we have them in the theme (in messages.xml), but that's not exactly ideal.
[09:43:56 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> While I have your attention, Eric. We would like to share some preferences between a bunch of different portlets. How would you go about doing that? Currently, we have a one properties file per portlet in a folder in tomcat's webapps folder, but we would like to consolidate this into one file (or whatever).
[09:44:58 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Maybe we could use Java's Preferences API, but I'm not sure how to modify those preferences without running Java code. The nice thing about properties files is that we can edit them directly on the server.
[09:46:12 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> For some reason I randomly get this error when I trying opening uPortal
[09:46:13 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005>
[09:46:18 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> http://dpaste.com/533957/
[09:46:55 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> rickard: I'm not really sure I've got a good suggestion for that
[09:47:06 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> How can I fix the SQL statments?
[09:48:12 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> oh those are expected failures, if you turn logging down from debug the stack trace goes away
[09:48:25 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> when the portal starts some of the older code does a bunch of join queries
[09:48:28 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> using various syntaxesz
[09:48:38 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> to determine what works for your DB
[09:48:53 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> oh ok thanks
[09:48:57 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yup
[09:55:02 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> EricDalquist: Ok. Thanks anyway.
[09:56:36 CDT(-0500)] <athena> rickard: are these configuration type preferences?
[09:56:50 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Yes
[09:56:55 CDT(-0500)] <athena> do they need to get changed frequently, or is it just something you set at installation time?
[09:57:09 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> The latter
[09:57:22 CDT(-0500)] <athena> ok, in that case i'd recommend using maven filtering
[09:57:23 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> We would however like to avoid having to redeploy
[09:57:38 CDT(-0500)] <athena> ah
[09:58:06 CDT(-0500)] <athena> generally what we've done is to use a single filter file that provides tokens for all the deployment-specific properties files in the portal and portlets
[09:58:08 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> I have to confess, I have no experience with maven. I understand it's very powerful.
[09:58:12 CDT(-0500)] <athena> though updating that does require a redeploy
[09:58:19 CDT(-0500)] <athena> yes, powerful is a good description
[09:58:21 CDT(-0500)] <athena> and complex
[09:58:25 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Mm
[09:58:54 CDT(-0500)] <athena> as of last weekend, there's some maven filtering in the uPortal trunk that allows a deployer to configure the hostname/port once
[09:59:16 CDT(-0500)] <rickard> Nice
[09:59:26 CDT(-0500)] <athena> here's an example of how the bundled CAS module is using it: https://source.jasig.org/uPortal/trunk/uportal-portlets-overlay/cas/pom.xml
[09:59:53 CDT(-0500)] <athena> i admit it's not completely trivial to get your head around, but it is a solution, and it'll probably show up more in uPortal's default distribution in the future
[12:49:17 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> Morning everyone. I haven't work in trunk in a while and attempted to build trunk this morning. I am getting a COMPILATION ERROR. It looks like it cannot find the PortletPublishingDefinition class file. Has anyone else run into this issue?
[12:49:37 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> hrm, I have note
[12:49:44 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> all of your local files are completely up to date?
[12:49:59 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I just ran svn update. I can double check.
[12:50:20 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> At revision 23439
[12:50:39 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> what does "svn update -u" show?
[12:50:40 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> url: https://source.jasig.org/uPortal/trunk
[12:50:53 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> just wondering if there are conflicts or something
[12:52:08 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> svn is complaining about the syntax svn update -u
[12:52:18 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I'm looking at the api now
[12:52:52 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> Subcommand 'update' doesn't accept option 'u [-show-updates]'
[12:52:57 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> sorry
[12:53:02 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> svn status -u
[12:53:10 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> been a long few days here in the dairy land
[12:53:33 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> no problem. was looking for that command.
[12:53:45 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I only get: Status against revision: 23439
[12:54:09 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> Should I just pull down the source again?
[12:54:24 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I assume the class in question is checked in.
[12:54:35 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> that should be fine then ...
[12:54:43 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> yeah you can give that a try
[12:56:00 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I'll try that. It happens right after the system tries to build uPortal War.
[12:56:30 CDT(-0500)] <athena> mpolizzotti: you'll need to copy the build.properties.sample over to build.properties and configure
[12:56:34 CDT(-0500)] <athena> don't think that's related though
[12:57:03 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> I believe I did that.
[12:58:09 CDT(-0500)] <mpolizzotti> Yep. I set my server.home to my tomcat instance.
[12:59:29 CDT(-0500)] <athena> ok
[12:59:32 CDT(-0500)] <athena> didn't sound related anyway
[13:01:48 CDT(-0500)] <athena> looks like urls like /p/fname aren't working right now
[13:02:01 CDT(-0500)] <athena> at least not with transient portlets that haven't been instantiated during the session yet
[13:02:01 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> biab meeting
[13:02:18 CDT(-0500)] <EricDalquist> athena: can you create a jira for that and assign it to me
[13:02:30 CDT(-0500)] <athena> yes
[13:03:50 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> Im still having troubles logging into uportal im getting these errors in my catalina.out log
[13:04:01 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> http://dpaste.com/534044/
[13:07:15 CDT(-0500)] <athena> mklein21005: looks like you have two instances of tomcat running
[13:07:18 CDT(-0500)] <athena> or something else runnign on that port
[13:07:26 CDT(-0500)] <athena> may be that tomcat didn't shut down cleanly at some point
[13:07:35 CDT(-0500)] <athena> i'd recommend killing all the current tomcat processes and restarting
[13:17:48 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> any idea of what might be causing this issue?
[13:19:50 CDT(-0500)] <holdorph> mklein21005: I thought athena answered your question. two tomcats are running
[13:20:01 CDT(-0500)] <holdorph> well that's the suspicion anyway
[13:24:41 CDT(-0500)] <mklein21005> yeah but what would cause 2 tomcats to run?
[13:25:17 CDT(-0500)] <holdorph> (11:07:31 AM) athena: may be that tomcat didn't shut down cleanly at some point
[13:26:02 CDT(-0500)] * holdorph has to head to a meeting.
[18:42:29 CDT(-0500)] <DrewWills> anyone still on? rel-3-1-patches isn't building for me... i get...
[18:42:45 CDT(-0500)] <DrewWills> [ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[18:42:46 CDT(-0500)] <DrewWills> [INFO] Could not find required NOTICE file: NOTICE