[Posted on behalf of Sal Pece]

Someone once told me: “If you’re going to be developing for WebSphere Portal, you’re going to have to use Rational Application Developer (RAD).â€? If I’m not mistaken, that someone was an IBM sales rep. Unfortunately, for many years I believed that RAD was the only way to go. It was available to me at every organization I worked. Finally, the day came when I had to develop Portlets as a contractor. Purchasing my own license would cost between $2000 and roughly $15k. 

If you don’t happen to have several thousand dollars lying around, but would still like an alternative to RAD and Portlet development, please keep reading.

To help you use Eclipse to develop WebSphere Portal 7 applications, I plan to answer the following questions:

• What does Rational Application Developer offer over Eclipse?
• What are the prerequisites?
• How do I import the Portlet Template?
• What do I have to change in the Portlet Template?
• Where can I locate the JAR files I require to develop Portlets?
• Where can I locate the JSP Tag libraries?
• How do I add the required JARs to the Build path?
• How can I deploy the Portlet?
• What’s next? 

Check out the full article for answers about Integrating Eclipse and WebSphere Portal 7.

The link the the full text of the article seems to be broken....

 Here's the correct url:

Dave

Looking forward to next article, since I have to evaluate RAD against other options for development on Websphere. Have you considered MyEclipse Blue as an alternative to RAD? It seems that MyEclipse Blue will suffice for Websphere Portal development.

Just a small note on this: while this might save you from having to use RAD, it will NOT save you from paying the licensing fee for RAD if you are intending to run a local WebSphere Portal instance for development. The license for RAD includes a license for running the WAS/Portal stack as a local develpment instance. The alternative is to license Portal itself locally, which will be considerably more expensive than the RAD license. Either way, pay you must if you want to be in compliance with IBM licensing.

@PP I wonder if there's a way around that licensing issue? Perhaps testing against LifeRay, or perhaps a remote server a client already has installed for sandbox testing. Or what about having a WebSphere Portal AMI isntance running in Amazon's cloud to which you could deploy. Just thougts.

@PP I wonder if there's a way around that licensing issue? Perhaps testing against LifeRay, or perhaps a remote server a client already has installed for sandbox testing. Or what about having a WebSphere Portal AMI isntance running in Amazon's cloud to which you could deploy. Just thougts.

I've had to use RAD over the years and honestly, it doesn't save you any time. RAD + WAS has got to be the biggest productivity obstacle in the java world. It works, but the pain threshold is rather high. Businesses pay big bucks for IBM consultants for a reason.

If you're only developing portlets according to the JSR spec and not using any IBM API:s, that's what I would do (use the most light-weight portlet container I could find as my development workbench). Problem is that you can rarely get away with "only standard portlets". At some point, you'll want to build or modify the portal theme. Or maybe you are running Lotus WCM on top and want to be able to develop custom components. Or you want to leverage some IBM service (like PUMA if you want to interact with the user repository or the WCM API if you are building custom WCM components). You can always try to mock these services in your dev container, but that's non-trivial.

My experience, especially working with Portal, is that you can never get away from having at least one or two RAD licenses because you WILL need to do some IBM-specific development against a "real" WebSphere Portal instance. Of course (like this very interesting article outlines), you don't have to USE the RAD. You just have to pay for it...

>>You can always try to mock these services in your dev container, but that's non-trivial

Indeed. I wouldn't want to even attempt that.

@PP, seems like you've gone through plenty of the pain associated with portal development.

One of the things I liked about this article wasn't just the idea of perhaps getting away from expensive licenses, but the idea that you didn't have to have RSA or some other IBM WebSphere Lotus Rational Domino etc etc etc product installed to do development - there's a way to do it with the latest, pruned, slimmed down version of ecliplse. There's definitely something to be said for that.

Adding the portal tags jar to the project's build path did not resolve the TLD reference in my JSP file,

<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/tld/portal.tld" prefix="portletAPI"%>  
<%@ taglib uri="/WEB-INF/tld/portal.tld" prefix="wps" %>  

I wonder why.

The taglib uri attribute in the tag usage should have referred to the respective uri in the definition, which is http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/websphere/portal/v5.1.0/portal .  The immediate paths to TLD files seem deprecated since JSP 1.2.