School dropout
becomes MILLIONAIRE!
Read his NLP methods.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Task 2 - Progress

Task:

  • Authentication and Session Management
    • variable session timeout for different user/groups
      • 10min grains - no timeout
    • one session only per loginID
      • prompt for session overwrite
  • User Login Management Portlet
    • manage users' session time out
    • tracks the users login/logout history
    • force log out of users
One session per loginID is simply done by tweaking the portal properties file, portal-ext.properties
Here's the critical line to take note of. Makes very good sense actually.
auth.simultaneous.logins=false

To force log out of users would mean the kill session feature already implemented in the admin portlet. Another one down.

Now the variable timeout... hmm...

Thursday, January 18, 2007

TIBCO sponsors DWR

TIBCO, The Power of Now, is sponsoring DWR development to enhance DWR and integrate DWR with TIBCO GI and TIBCO AM. Good move!

Full story here

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

Task 2

Task:
  • Authentication and Session Management
    • variable session timeout for different user/groups
      • 10min grains - no timeout
    • one session only per loginID
      • prompt for session overwrite
  • User Login Management Portlet
    • manage users' session time out
    • tracks the users login/logout history
    • force log out of users
Challenges:
  • every part of it...

Monday, January 8, 2007

Task 1 - Bugs

Here are some of the bugs which I managed to workaround eventually. I don't know if they were logical errors or liferay bugs though.

Bug #1 - Polling continues after portlet removal
So my portlet would poll the server every 3 seconds via AJAX, this is great, until I remove an instance of the portlet. The AJAX component, javascript obviously, would continue even though the portlet has been removed and I was bombarded by heaps of javascript errors every 3 seconds.

Wordaround
Check for existence of a field before polling. This is a logical workaround, but I would think that it is even more logical if the javascript stops work once the portlet is removed.

Bug #2 - Wrong forwarding to "portlet_not_setup"
Did a little testing and found this bug. 4 instances of portlet, 1 previously configured. After using the configuration setup for a 2nd portlet and saving, I was greeted with a shock. All 4 portlets were forwarded to the "/portal/portlet_not_setup" page. But 2 were actually set up, so what went wrong?

Investigation
After playing around with print statements, I realised that none of the portlets were forwarded to the view page. I don't get it. Here's the "before" code snippet.

String var = getVar(req, res);

if (Validator.isNull(var)){
return mapping.findForward("/portal/portlet_not_setup");
}

req.setAttribute("var", var);

return mapping.findForward("portlet.ext.testportlet.view");


The printlns tell me that they are actually going through the right loop and if the portlet instances had "var" configured, but they were just not forwarded to the view page. Everything was just mysteriously directed to the portlet_not_setup page even though the loop was not even traversed by the particular portlets.

Workaround
Forwarding everything to "view" as a workaround now. It shouldn't be this way, but I had to make things work. Here's the "after" code:

String var = getVar(req, res);

//if (Validator.isNull(var)){
// return mapping.findForward("/portal/portlet_not_setup");
//}

req.setAttribute("var", var);

return mapping.findForward("portlet.ext.testportlet.view");


And there's now a check at the "view" page to realize the existence of the param "var", showing a message to ask for configuration if param is not found.


Any advice or comments on this, anyone?

Friday, January 5, 2007

Task 1 - Milestone 1

AJAX

After reading several articles on how easy it is to implement AJAX with DWR, I decided to give it a try.

"DWR allows Javascript in a browser to interact with Java on a server and helps you manipulate web pages with the results."

True enough, with sufficient knowledge of javascript, working AJAX with DWR was like snatching candy from kids.

It only took 3 pages of DWR reading to achieve my task 1 AJAX objectives:
The simple AJAX implementation with DWR also allowed polling and updating of my portlet to be done with just a if(true) loop with a setTimeOut().

Multiple Instances of Portlet

Googled for how to develop portlets which allowed multiple instances, but to no avail. So posted a msg to the liferay forums.

Add this tag true
to the portlet configuration in liferay-portlet-ext.xml.

Simple as that.

Time to meet my boss.

Tuesday, January 2, 2007

NEWS: InfoWorld 2007 Technology of the Year Awards: Liferay Wins for Best Open Source Portal!

"Liferay Portal 4.0 rivals many commercial portal platforms in both functionality and technology. Liferay permits separate portals for different business units, and you can hot deploy any JSR 168 compliant portlet..."

Read full article here.