To read the introduction to this blog series, click... Content Migration for Enterprise Portals: Almost as much fun as moving

“How much stuff do we have?  How should we estimate that?”

“Should we just get a U-Haul and move ourselves, or do we need a professional carrier?”

 “How long will it be between boxing up our belongings and being able to unpack them?  What do we need access to during that period?”

These are just a few of the many questions that must be answered as you decide how to execute a move.  Each has a parallel encountered during the initial stages of content migration planning.

I recently lived the joy of a multi-step interstate move that included professional packing, multiple trucks, and a month of storage between moving out and moving in.  As my wife and I continue to wade through the remnants of unpacking, I’ve taken some time to look back and contemplate what we might have done differently to make it a more pleasant and efficient process.  (NB:  Our movers, Hilldrup Moving & Storage, were excellent and I highly recommend them.  Even still, I doubt many will argue with this universal point: moving stinks.)  While pondering the lessons we learned, it dawned on me how the moving process can serve as a useful analogy for a similarly intimidating challenge in the enterprise portal realm: content migration. 

Switching out your Weblogic Page Flow Controllers in favor of Spring Controllers is easier than you might think. Here are just a few steps to help the integration.

Dependencies

The latest production release version of Spring is version 3.0.2. In this version they have broken the release into about 20 different jar files. The libraries listed below are those that you will need to include in the WEB-INF/lib your project:

It is very common to put a WebLogic Portal cluster behind a web server or load balancer.  Most implementations I have seen to date either use an F5, Apache Web Server, or a combination of the two to serve up the portal content.  If you are also trying to access the Portal Admin Console through the web server you most likely experienced some sort of session affinity issue.  I realize most IT shops will just access the Portal Admin Console through a specific combination of managed host and port.  However, if you have any desire to access the Portal Admin Console through a web server or load balancer (especially for CMS functions or just a friendly url), here is why the session affinity issue is presenting itself.

The Portal Admin Console was developed to use a non standard Cookie Name.  By default, weblogic applications will use the JSESSIONID Cookie Name to maintain the user session.  However, the WebLogic Portal Admin Console uses a differe

Chris O'Keefe and I were assigned to investigate enterprise mashups, and we both immediately had the same flashback to our days in Northern Virginia, which was the first time we had heard the word mashup used. The popular local radio station, DC101, would air them on Sunday evenings, where they would combine two good songs, to make something that sounded just awful. As a result, our initial thoughts on the concept of mashups were not all that positive, that is until we realized they are one of the emerging trends of Web 2.0.

Recently I oversaw an internal development effort to integrate Vivisimo's Velocity search engine into Microsoft SharePoint and JBoss Portal.  CapTech has experience with several search products and many have the same integration challenges.  We found that Velocity's architecture simplifies or eliminates many of these challenges.  Here are just a few great features that we leveraged in this project.

Thanks to Andy Pemberton for helping me with this one.  It definitely had me confused for a couple days.  This issue is specific to IE and only presents itself when you are exposing your portal over HTTP, but are accessing through an HTTPS load balancer or web server.  The result is a mixed content popup from IE everytime you access a page.  This is caused by an iframe shim being inserted by WebLogic portal for the automatic menu navigation.  The fix is easy and straightforward, but finding the solution was not as easy.

To fix this issue, navigate in your Portal Web project to the Merged Project Content "virtual" directory in Eclipse which should be directly under the Portal Web project when viewing in the Portal perspective.  Under that directory, navigate to framework -> skins -> bighorn -> msie.  Right-

If you have ever created a WebLogic Portal domain, you are aware that the Domain Wizard automatically creates your Portal Database schema.  This is very nice if you are a developer or are new to the product, as it allows most anyone to create a fully functional Portal domain in minutes.  However, this is not a long term solution for building out multiple environments with a repeatable and scripted process. 

WebLogic Portal comes with all the necessary SQL scripts to create the required DB resources.  However, it unfortunately does not provide clear documentation on how to leverage these scripts, nor does Oracle provide a master SQL script for executing the provided SQL scripts in the correct order.

I am going provide the steps to create this master SQL script for any supported WebLogic Portal DB.  Also, I will provide the steps for the Oracle DB, you can easily adapt these for any supported DB.  For the purpose

I am officially kicking off a WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions series of blogs.  I am focusing on WebLogic Portal 10.x because it seems to lack the depth of documentation and examples that BEA has produced in the past and the product is bigger than ever.  As I have witnessed at my clients, this has led to unnecessary frustration and confusion.  My goal is to address some of the more common challenges I have seen and provide simple solutions.  I will primarily address issues I have seen cause frustration at multiple clients as they should pertain to a wider audience. 

I plan on starting my series with the following topics:

Spring Source pushed the first release candidate of Spring 3 a little more than a month ago; it took a little longer than expected, but nonetheless I've been waiting on this release to play around with the new Portlet MVC features.

For portlet developers, the most notable enhancements are in the support for the Portlet 2.0 spec (JSR286), primarily offered through a new set of portlet-specific annotations. There are also various enhancements to Spring Core and Web MVC that will be useful on portal projects and standard java web projects.

I've built an example portlet application to show off some of these new features; it's downloadable below as a deployable WAR (tested on JBoss Portal 2.7.2) and a mavenized eclipse project (zip).