Got my first portlet to run today
March 29, 2006Took a surprising amount of detective work, and the help of two co-workers, to get my first “Hello, World” portlet running today. Amazing how difficult this stuff is, though I guess that complexity does offer potential for flexibility.
I don’t know if this is a weakness just of the Oracle Portal product or the general portal spec, but it doesn’t support long file names. At least not when those file names include spaces. That turned out to be one of the big issues I was having, the paths on my PC had spaces (C:\Documents and Settings\rexb\Desktop\ …). But the Oracle Portal servlet container, called Oracle Container for Java (OC4J) would have none of that. Unfortunately the error wasn’t exactly informative, we only realized the problem after eliminating a bunch of other possibilities.
It’s also finicky in terms of case-sensitivity. I mean, it’s running on a PC so it shouldn’t matter whether the path includes a capital letter for the disk drive or not. That is, “c:” should be the same as “C:”. Again, Oracle Portal doesn’t like that at all. Another bug that took us an hour to figure out.
But still, it felt like I had a very successful day overall. Not only did I get my portlet deployed to the dev server, I also got the local dev OC4J working as well. So I’ll be able to test locally and deploy to the dev server.
Now comes the really hard part–getting this all talking to the various PL/SQL components.
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