Develop and deploy the Apache Pluto Portal application on Apache Geronimo

Introduction: You can still use Geronimo as a test and deployment environment for your portal applications, even though the functional focus of Apache Geronimo lacks the integrated Portal Server support. This article will guide you step-by-step through the process of deploying the Apache Pluto Drive and container in Geronimo, providing your portal application with a complete open source environment. Then learn how to develop, deploy, and test the sample portal application in Pluto and Geronimo.

Apache Pluto and Apache Geronimo: Quick Start

Apache Pluto is a reference implementation of Java™portlet specification (JSR 168). Pluto will provide the basic lightweight container interface implementation specified in JSR 168 and a portal drive with other utilities for developing standard portlets. Pluto is used as a basic portlet container for implementing the Portlet APIs and providing developers with a working sample platform that can host portlets. The simple portal component of Pluto is built solely on the requirements of the Portlet container and JSR 168.

Apache Geronimo 1.1 is the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.4 Certified Open source application server. Unlike other Java EE application servers, Geronimo integrates external resource components such as databases, messaging servers, and directory servers in advance. Geronimo is built on a highly customizable and modular architecture. It is used as a framework to support existing components to form a complete Java Application Server package containing more than 30 optimal supply (best-of-breed) Open source projects. Geronimo was previously integrated with Apache Tomcat or Apache Jetty, and this article uses a Geronimo version with Tomcat.

Although Apache Pluto itself is a WEB application built on the Java EE Standard, it cannot be deployed directly as it is. In addition, all of the Pluto portal applications that are developed cannot be installed directly into the Pluto portal container. Developers typically deploy Pluto to the Apache Tomcat Web container, but this is not your only option. Geronimo can also host the Pluto application. This article will show you how to use the Pluto Portal Server in conjunction with Geronimo to provide a complete open source testing and deployment environment for portal applications with rich, functional, common application servers in the background.

Portals, Portlets, and APIs

A portal is a Web site that is used as a starting point for obtaining information and applications on the Internet or on the internal network. They typically provide personalization, single sign-on, content aggregation from multiple resources, and a presentation layer for managed information systems. To accommodate aggregation and display a variety of content, the Portal Server provides a framework for dividing different portal components into portlets.

A portlet is a window in a portal that provides a specific service or information. The portlet is responsible for accessing content from its own resources (for example, a Web site, database, or e-mail server) and converting the content for rendering to the client. JSR 168 is the standard API for creating portlets. It provides an integration component between the application and the portal that will allow the application to be delivered through the portal. Without this standard, each application might need its own portlet API.

The process of deploying and executing a Web application in Geronimo differs from the process of deploying and executing a Web application in Tomcat. The remainder of this article shows you how to deploy and execute the sample portal application in Pluto, which is hosted on Geronimo, by following these steps:

Share Pluto libraries and attributes through the Sharedlib module.

Create a Geronimo deployment plan for Pluto containers and drives.

Deploy Pluto in Geronimo.

Develop the sample portal application.

Create the necessary deployment plan for the sample portal application.

Deploy and test the sample portal application on Geronimo.

To begin, you need to download, install, and decompress Geronimo and Pluto first. I will refer to the installation directory of Geronimo as Geronimo_home. You can download the source code version or the binary version of Pluto. According to the instructions in the Pluto Installation Guide: "Installing the source version requires more work, and only those who are interested in modifying the personal installation of the container, I refer to the location of the downloaded binary version as pluto_home and reference the source version location as PLUTO_SRC (when I show you P The file location in Luto_home, you can locate the same file if you have already built the source file version.