Preparing Liferay EXT environment

• Install JDK and ANT.

• Set JAVA_HOME and ANT_HOME to your Ant and Java directories. Add JAVA_HOME\bin and ANT_HOME\bin to System Path.
• Create a Liferay directory:
  

$HOME/liferay-devel (refered as {LIFERAY}).

• Create a directory called:

{LIFERAY}/portal
and unzip de Liferay sources into it.

• Create a file called:

release.{user name}.properties, where {user name} is the user name used to develop.

• and put the next lines with the appropiate values:

lp.ext.dir={LIFERAY}/ext

• If you expect to be using eclipse add also a property called lp.eclipse.project.name with the desired name of the project:

lp.eclipse.project.name=liferay-ext

• Create a file called:

app.server.{user name}.properties

• and put the next lines with the appropiate values:

app.server.type=tomcat
app.server.tomcat.dir={LIFERAY}/tomcat
sourceforge.mirror=http://belnet.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/lportal

• Create a file called:

build.{user name}.properties

• and put the next lines with the appropiate values:

javac.compiler=modern, for use Sun's compiler.
javac.fork=true

• Go into {LIFERAY}/portal directory an execute:

> ant clean
> ant start
> ant build-ext

This must create a directory {LIFERAY}/ext (or what you called in lp.ext.dir) and create your EXT environment.

• Copy files release.{user name}.properties, app.server.{user name}.properties and build.{user name}.properties to the {LIFERAY}/ext directory.

• Go to the {LIFERAY}/ext/servers and execute:

> ant install-tomcat
It must download and install a tomcat liferay bundle into {LIFERAY}/tomcat.

• The idea is to have:

{LIFERAY}
{LIFERAY}/ext -> Your EXT environment to develop.
{LIFERAY}/portal -> The portal sources used to create the EXT.
{LIFERAY}/tomcat -> The server (lifery bundle) used to develop.

• Now execute:

> chmod a+x {LIFERAY}/tomcat/bin/*.sh

• and try to start liferay bundle:

> {LIFERAY}/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh start

• Connect to http://localhost:8080 (user test@liferay.com, password test).

Meta Tracker

MetaTracker is a powerful desktop-neutral first class object database, tag/metadata database, search tool and indexer...
To install on Ubuntu see: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MetaTracker

Basically, Tracker indexes the content of your home directory allowing to search content like documents or music.

I have it !!!

Finally I have the book.
Rich Client Programming: Plugging into the NetBeans Platform
Yeah.

Visual Web Application and JPA

Today I want to point to a couple of articles Contributed by Winston Prakash, maintained by Beth Stearns about Visual Web Pack in NetBeans 6 and the more useful option to use JPA to bind component.
Now instead bind a table ind a DB with a VWP table component and edit directly to the DB you can obtain data as entities and put it in the visual table component.

http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/web/web-jpa.html
http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/web/web-jpa-part2.html

Open Clip Art Library is on !!!

After some months changing the hosting and interface OpenClipArt Library are on fire one more time.
I love it.

NetBeans OpenGL pack

Via PlanetNetBeans and a Roumen's post I have found out a new plugin for NetBeans to work with OpenGL:

netbeans-opengl-pack - Take a look at the screenshots page:

Visual diff

Today, via the Core Dump neighbor I found meld.
I usually work with NetBeans or Eclipse. Both needs you have open one or more projects to compare its files. I was looking for a tool like the 'diff' command line tool but more user friendly.

I think meld is it (and it is included as a package in Ubuntu).

Coloring nodes

NetBeans brings platform developers a way to improve node labels using simplified subset of HTML tags.
You can see it in action here in the nodes API tutorial.

Supposing you have a subclass of Node or AbstractNode classes, the only thing you need to do is override the getHtmlDisplayName() method.

@Override
public String getHtmlDisplayName() {
String name;

if(updateState) {
name = "Name";
} else {
name = "RED Name";
}

return name;
}


This peace of code returns the name of the node depending on the 'updateState' attribute. If something is wrong then the name is rendered in red.

Also, the 'updateState' can change in any moment, then only you need to do is to fire that display node name has changed with:

fireDisplayNameChange(oldName, newName);


Take in account that the old and new names must be different. If not, the fire method won't have any effect.

Communicating with the User (and Yourself)

(From Geertjan's Weblog)

If you use System.out and the JOptionPane to communicate with your users, or with yourself during debugging or testing, you might be interested in knowing about similar (better!) facilities that the NetBeans APIs make available...

Read...

Presentations from Sun Tech Days

Today I want to point to this post from Charles Ditzel blog with a list of the available presentations of Sun Tech Days.