Portal 2.2 Community Portlets

	Table of Contents 1 Community-Developed Portlets in the caGrid Portal 1.1 Overview 1.2 Developing Portlets 2 Deploying Portlets in the caGrid Portal 2.1 Install caGrid Portal 2.2 Download Sample Portlet 2.3 Deploy Sample Portlet 2.4 Redeploy

Community-Developed Portlets in the caGrid Portal

Overview

This is a short tutorial on how to deploy a user/community developed portlet into the caGrid Portal version 2.2. This feature is currently supported in the caGrid Portal. For developers that want to deploy a local instance to test their portlets, this Tutorial will help you install a local instance.

caGrid Portal is a web application that is developed on the Liferay Portal. caGrid Portal has a number of JSR-168 compliant portlets that are deployed by default. Developers in the caBIG® community may create Java Specification Request 168 (JSR 168) compliant portlets and then deploy them to the caGrid Portal. This provides an instant hosting environment for custom applications that may be of value to the entire caBIG® community.

Before submitting your portlet to the caGrid team, be sure to test it locally. Below are the steps on how you can deploy a JSR-168 Portlet into a local installation of caGrid Portal.

Developing Portlets

The following links should help

• Spring MVC Portlet
• Liferay development guide
• Struts Based Portlets on Liferay Portal
• caGrid Portal Design Document

Also, look at the Sample EVS portlet developed specifically to serve as sample for Portlet developers. You can find more information on the EVS Portlet.

Deploying Portlets in the caGrid Portal

Install caGrid Portal

• Download the latest release (version 2.2) of caGrid Portal from the gforge site.
• Unzip the caGrid Portal Release to ${PORTAL_HOME} directory.
• Install and configure the caGrid Portal. Installation instructions can be found here.

Download Sample Portlet

• For this example we will use a sample Portlet that you can download here.

Note: There are samples Portlets that use Struts and Spring MVC API's. Download a version compatible with Liferay 5.0.1

Deploy Sample Portlet

• Place the downloaded sample Portlet in the ${PORTAL_LIFERAY}/deploy folder.

Note: The ${PORTAL_LIFERAY} folder is the directory where you chose to install the Portal.

• Start up your local JBOSS server.

• Log in to the caGrid Portal as the administrative user. Please refer the administration guide found here for more information.

• Once you log in, you see the default page shown below.

Homepage for Admin User

• From the drop-down menu (top right), select My Places > Guest > Public Pages as shown below.

Admin Menu

• Select the Community tab as shown in the figure below. This is where all the community portlets are hosted.

  caGrid Portal 2.1 with the community tab

• Once you are on the Community page, you see a blank page with no portlets. From from the drop-down menu (top right), select the Add Content link. This displays (shown below) a list of portlets that you can deploy in the caGrid Portal.

Add New Portlet

• The sample Portal that we deployed in Step 1 should also appear under "Sample/Spring/Pets". Select the Pets portlet and the page updates itself.

Sample Portlet deployed

• Logout

• Now when you open the Portal in a web browser (http://localhost:8080), you can see the Sample Portlet on the Community page. We have just successfully deployed the sample portlet as a community portlet in the caGrid Portal.

Redeploy

To re-deploy a previously deployed community or sample portlet, do the following.

• Shut down your local JBOSS instance.
• Copy the new portlet archive(war) into the ${PORTAL_LIFERAY}/deploy.
• Start up JBOSS.