Migration from IBM Rational Application Developer Version ...public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/rational/pdf/RAD_PortalMigration.pdf · IBM® Rational® Application Developer Version

Migration from IBM Rational Application Developer Version 6 to Version 7 for portlet development

Part of a series on portal and portlet development

By Saurabh Agarwal Principal Software Engineer

IBM Corporation

Level: Intermediate to Advanced

August 2007

mailto:[email protected]

Migrating portals from Rational Application Developer V6 to V7, Page 2 of 25

Copyright © 2007, IBM® Corporation. All rights reserved. Published by IBM® developerWorks®.

Contents

Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 3

Introduction.............................................................................................................................. 3

Portal tooling enhancements in Rational Application Developer V7 ........................................ 3 Streamlined Portlet Project creation wizard ......................................................................... 3 Cooperative Portlet Development wizards ......................................................................... 10 Enhanced credential vault support..................................................................................... 16 Enhanced business process portlets ................................................................................. 17 WebSphere Portal 6 support.............................................................................................. 18

Migrating Rational Application Developer Version 6 portlet projects to V7 ............................ 19 Migrating WebSphere Portal Version 5 portlets to Version 6 ............................................. 21 Updating JavaServer Faces runtime resources in a portlet project.................................... 22

Other articles in this series .................................................................................................... 25

Resources ............................................................................................................................. 25

About the author .................................................................................................................... 25



Abstract IBM® Rational® Application Developer Version 7 scores high on performance, user interfaces, and ease of use for Java™ application developers (both Java 2™ Platform Standard Edition, or J2SE, and Java™ 2 Platform Enterprise Edition, or J2EE, developers). It has changed significantly from Version 6 in terms of GUI, project creation wizards, and user preferences. The overall layout has been improved for better performance and a richer development experience. This article gives you an overview of these improvements for creating and developing portal and portlet projects. It compares the new wizards and other UI features with the earlier version and shows how the latest version makes it easier to develop portals and portlets. It also guides you through migrating projects developed in version 6 to version 7.

Introduction Rational Application Developer V7 is a premium product that is part of the IBM® Software Delivery Platform. Its many benefits cut across various dimensions that affect developers. It is a true integrated development environment (IDE), because it provides a single environment for designing, building, testing, and deploying, all from the same workbench. In addition, it is based on Eclipse 3.2, thereby inheriting its new and advanced features. The portal tooling features of Rational Application Developer have been overhauled for version 7. These are among the most substantial changes:

• Various wizards have been enhanced to make them easier to use. • Java™ Specification Request (JSR) 168 is now supported. • Support for IBM® WebSphere® Application Server 6.1 has been added. • Enhanced wizards for developing business workflow process portlets. • And the most noteworthy enhancement: support for WebSphere Portal 6. This support

includes: o New Target Runtime option: IBM® WebSphere® Portal 6.0 o Migration of configuration files from IBM portlets to JSR168 portlets o Support for edit_defaults portlet mode

Portal tooling enhancements in Rational Application Developer V7 Let’s examine these enhancements in enough detail to understand their benefits, as well as their effects.

Streamlined Portlet Project creation wizard The Portlet Project creation wizard in Rational Application Developer V7 has been reduced to four pages, as compared to the eight-page wizard (for Basic Portlets) of Rational Application Developer V6.



Figure 1: Rational Application Developer V7 Portlet Project Creation wizard pages



Figure 2: Rational Application Developer V6 Portlet Project creation wizard pages



Figure 2: Rational Application Developer V6 Portlet Project creation wizard pages (continued)

Portlet Project creation page The Portlet Project creation page provides pull-down menus to select portlet APIs and the portlet type. This page also has the pull-down menu for the target runtime, and its selection determines supported APIs and types.



Figure 3: Portlet Project creation wizard, Page 1

Portlet Settings page The Portlet Settings page packs various elements into an easy-to-use flow for better navigation. For the selected runtime, API, and types, the supported content type and portlet modes are updated dynamically. There is a provision to add non-default content types and the corresponding portlet modes, but at the portlet creation time only. Thus, you no longer have to edit the portlet settings at a later point in development. This page also includes input fields to provide support for locations other than the default location.



Figure 4: Portlet Project creation wizard, Page 2 (Portlet Settings)

Note: The wizard pages also have integrated Help pages.



Figure 5: Portlet Project creation wizard, Page 3 (Action and Preferences)

Advance Settings page

The Advance Settings page enables you to define the services for the portlet.



Figure 5: Rational Application Developer V7 Portlet Project creation wizard, Page 4 (Advanced Settings)

Cooperative Portlet Development wizards Enabling cooperative portlets for Source or Target used to require advanced knowledge. Now these wizards take you through various steps with clear instructions and an easy-to-use UI.

• Page 1: The Data Type Definition wizard helps you use complex data types by enabling you to browse for a Java™ type.



Figure 6: Cooperative – Enable Source wizard, Page 1

• Page 2: Defines the source actions and property transfers.




• Page 3: Captions enable you to define the text that will be shown in the portal wiring tool to represent a property name and action.




• Page 4: This is one of the most important enhancements. For JSR 168, the simpler

Click-to-Action (C2A) mechanism it not available. Therefore, you must use the wiring mechanism, which involves multiple steps in configuration, UI design, and portlet class programming. It is very error-prone. Rational Application Developer V7 provides a Next Steps guide in HTML format to help you with the steps to follow to complete the wiring.




• Code examples HTML page: At least two code examples that follow best practices are provided. You can use them either by simply copying and pasting them or by following the steps that are included on the page.



Figure 10: HTML page with sample code and instructions, opened in a Web browser

• Cooperative action and data type information is displayed in the Project Explorer view (see Figure 11).

Figure 11: Cooperative Portlets in the Project Explorer view

• A menu option is provided to remove the cooperative configurations from portlet.xml,

web.xml, and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) files.



Figure 12: Cooperative portlets menu in the Project Explorer view

Enhanced credential vault support Rational Application Developer V7 now provides tooling to generate credential vault portlet services for both JSF and Struts portlets. For better security, the application uses a reference name rather than an actual name for administrator slots. You can map this from config mode (configuration mode).

Figure 13: Credential Vault Portlet in config mode

Edit mode is used to store the credentials in the slot, as Figure 14 shows.



Figure 14: Credential vault portlet in Edit mode

Enhanced business process portlets Rational Application Developer V7 supports APIs from WebSphere Portal Server and WebSphere Integration Developer for business processes. Table 1 and Table 2 display the APIs that are supported.

Table1. Task-processing API

Task manager Runtime

Factory JNDI Factory interface Method name

WebSphere Portal 6.0

portletservice/com.ibm.portal.portlet.service.taskmanager.HumanTaskManagerDelegateFactoryService

HumanTaskManagerDelegateFactoryService

getHumanTaskManagerDelegate()


portletservice/com.ibm.portal.portlet.service.taskmanager.TaskManagerDelegateFactoryService

TaskManagerDelegateFactoryService

getTaskManagerDelegate()

Table 2. Process-initiation API

Runtime EJB Home JNDI name EJB Home interface EJB remote interface


java:comp/env/ejb/BusinessFlowManagerHome

com.ibm.bpe.api.BusinessFlowManagerHome

BusinessFlowManager

WebSphere Portal 5.1 java:comp/env/ejb/BusinessProcessHome com.ibm.bpe.api.BusinessProc

essHome BusinessProcess

• Supports multiple actions, in addition to processTask()

o processTaskAndClosePage() calls processTask(), and then calls closePage()

o processTaskOnly() calls processTask() only o storeOutputMessageAndClosePage() calls storeOutputMessage(), and

then calls closePage() o storeOutputMessageOnly() calls storeOutputMessage() only o cancelProcessing() calls closePage() directly



• Automatically generates code into the message get method to populate new message objects. This is possible because, in WebSphere Portal Server 6.0, the business process messages are Service Data Objects (commonj.sdo.DataObject).

Listing 1. Service Data Object reference automatically generated in portlet class by Rational Application Developer v7

public Object getTravelRequestInput() { if (travelRequestInput == null) { travelRequestInput = getSessionScope().get( ProcessInitiationHelper.PROCESS_INPUT_MESSAGE); DataObject sdo = (DataObject)travelRequestInput; sdo.set("Requestor", sdo.createDataObject("Requestor")); sdo.set("FlightReservation", sdo.createDataObject("FlightReservation"));

• Custom Property resolver enables business process messages (SDOs, or Service Data Objects) to be bound to JSF controls.

Listing 2. Property resolver entries automatically inserted in Faces configuration XML (faces-config.xml) by Rational Application Developer v7

<property-resolver>com.ibm.faces.sdo.bp.SDOPropertyResolver</property-resolver>

WebSphere Portal 6 support • A new runtime option has been added, to provide full support for WebSphere Portal

Server 6. This is full installation of WebSphere Portal Server 6, thus developers can test and debug Portal Server features from within Rational Application Developer V7.



Figure 15: Define New Server view

• Supports a new portlet mode, edit_default (a shared preference available only to the portal administrator).

Migrating Rational Application Developer Version 6 portlet projects to V7 Note: It is advisable to back up Rational Application Developer V6 before migration of the complete workspace. There are various ways by which Rational Application Developer V6 portlet projects are automatically migrated to Rational Application Developer V7:

• Workspace migration: Start Rational Application Developer V7 with the old workspace (Rational Application Developer V6), and Version 7 automatically migrates the projects. This is confirmed by a progress indicator. It may result in a Problems dialog box (see Figure 15 for an example).



Figure 16: Migration Problems notification

However, this has no impact on successful migration of the workspace. It simply warns you that the perspective could not be restored, which you can do, instead, by using the Windows > Reset perspective menu option

• Project migration: Individual projects can be migrated from Rational Application Developer V6 using import and export wizards. Export the project from V6 in Project Interchange zip format, and then import these projects into the V7 workspace by using the Import Project Interchange wizard. Rational Application Developer V7 automatically migrates these projects.

• Migrating projects loaded from a version-control system: Projects from V6.0 that exist in an software configuration management (SCM) system are automatically migrated when they are loaded in Rational Application Developer V7.

• Settings: The portlet facet settings for various projects in the portlet projects .settings/.org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.xml file should be as you see in Table 3.



Table 3: Portlet project facets mapping

Facets IBMPortlet. base

IBMPortlet.struts

IBMPortlet.faces

JSR168. base

JSR168. struts

JSR168. faces

JSR168. portal*

Project type

IBM empty X

IBM Struts X X

IBM Faces X X

JSR empty X X

JSR Struts X X X

JSR Faces X X X

*6.0

Migrating WebSphere Portal Version 5 portlets to Version 6 In most cases, portlets developed for WebSphere Portal V5 will run on WebSphere Portal Server 6. However, migration of the portlet projects to the server runtime version where these portlets will finally be deployed is suggested. To do that, follow these steps:

1. In the Project Explorer, right-click on the project name in the Project drop-down menu, and select the Properties menu item to open the project Properties dialog.

2. Type runtime in the available filter text field, and select Targeted Runtimes from the left pane. This will list the available runtimes in the right pane.

3. Select WebSphere Portal V6.0 from this list, and click OK. This will modify the server classpath container, the Java™ runtime environment (JRE), and the project’s target runtime to WebSphere Portal Server 6.0.

Figure 17: Target Runtime settings for the portlet project

Note: If this portlet project is associated with an enterprise archive (EAR) project, then follow the same steps to change the target runtime of this EAR project also.



Figure 18: Target Runtime settings for the portlet project EAR

Updating JavaServer Faces runtime resources in a portlet project You can update JSF runtime resources either automatically or manually.

Automatic updates Rational Application Developer V7 includes updated Java™Server Faces (JSF) runtime resources. It is best to update these resources when a portlet project is migrated from V6 to V7. When you import a V6 project into V7, you are prompted to update the JSF runtime resources to the latest levels.

Figure 19: JSF portlet project migration information screen

• Click Yes to update the resources automatically. • (Alternative) To update the resources later, close and reopen the portlet project or

close the workbench and start it again.



Caution: Never keep the resources at the older level.

Manual updates • Import the portlet project that needs to be migrated into Rational Application Developer

V7. • Create a new Faces portlet project (for instance, sampleJSF) that is targeted on

WebSphere Portal 6. This new project is used as a source for the latest runtime libraries, which Rational Application Developer V7 automatically puts in the portlet project’s library folder (WebContnet/WEB-INF/lib).

• For an existing Faces project that requires an update, follow these steps: 1. Right-click on the project in the Project Explorer view, open the project

Properties, and set the Target runtime to WebSphere Portal 6 (see the Migrating WebSphere Portal Version 5 portlets to Version 6 section for more details).

2. Repeat the previous step for the EAR project that is associated with the portlet project.

3. In the Navigator view, expand an existing project to show the files in the WebContent/WEB-INF/lib/ folder. Delete the following Java™ archive (JAR) files from this directory:

jsf-api.jar jsf-ibm.jar jsf-impl.jar jsf-portlet.jar odc-jsf.jar

4. Open the WebContent/WEB-INF/faces-config.xml file. Add the following elements to this configuration file if they are not already present:



Listing 3. Elements to add to the Faces configuration XML file (faces-config.xml)

<lifecycle> <phase-listener>com.ibm.faces.webapp.ValueResourcePhaseListener </phase-listener> </lifecycle> <application> <variable-resolver>com.ibm.faces.databind.SelectItemsVarResolver </variable-resolver> <variable-resolver>com.ibm.faces.application.WPPortletVariableResolver

Note: If the portlet project is using the JSR 168 API, specify: com.ibm.faces.application.PortletVariableResolver rather than com.ibm.faces.application.WPPortletVariableResolver.

5. For any JAR files that were deleted, copy the JAR file of the same name from the WebContent/WEB-INF/lib directory of the sampleJSF project and paste it into the original project in the same location. Do not copy a particular JAR file if it was not in the original project.

If the portlet project uses the IBM portlet API or person link component, copy the jsf-wp.jar file into the original project.

If the odc-jsf.jar file is copied, copy the file odc-jsf-portlet.jar, as well. 6. Open the web.xml deployment descriptor in the original project, and add the

following code shown in Listing 4 to the configuration:

Listing 4. Elements to be added in Web Deployment Descriptor (web.xml) of the project

<context-param> <param-name>com.ibm.ws.jsf.JSP_UPDATE_CHECK</param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> </context-param> <context-param> <param-name>com.ibm.ws.jsf.LOAD_FACES_CONFIG_AT_STARTUP </param-name> <param-value>true</param-value> / t t

This completes the migration, and you can delete the sampleJSF file that you created.



Other articles in this series Check the One-stop guide to portal and portlet application development using Rational Application Developer V7 and WebSphere Portal V6 for summaries of the nine other articles in this series and links to download each of them in PDF format. Topics covered include the predevelopment resources, portlet tooling features, portal design tools, and the testing, deploying, and debugging capabilities of Rational Application Developer. Resources Learn

• Get information on IBM Rational Application Developer and how to use it: o What's new in IBM Rational Application Developer V7.0 o IBM Rational Application Developer Version 7.0 Information Center o Rational Application Developer page on IBM® developerWorks®

• For product documentation for various offerings of WebSphere Portal software, visit the IBM WebSphere Portal Version 6.0 Information Center.

• Visit the Rational page on developerWorks to find technical resources and learn about best practices for the Rational Software Delivery Platform.

• Subscribe to The Rational Edge weekly newsletter.

Discuss • Participate in the Rational Software Architect, Data Architect, Software Modeler,

Systems Developer, Application Developer and Web Developer forums and the WebSphere Portal forum, where you can ask questions, share your experiences, and discuss problems and solutions.

Download

• Get the evaluation version of Rational Application Developer for WebSphere. • Get evaluation versions of WebSphere software.

About the author Saurabh Agarwal, Principal Software Engineer, is the project lead for the Portal Tooling component of Rational Application Developer in the Lotus group at IBM India Software Labs in Delhi, India. He has more than seven years of experience in Java and Web development, with the most recent years of that experience at IBM.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/downloads/07/rad_portal_series/index.html

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/downloads/07/rad_portal_series/index.html

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/06/1205_lloyd_rad/

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/radhelp/v7r0m0/index.jsp

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/products/rad/

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/wpdoc/v6r0/index.jsp

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/rationaledge/

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/forums/dw_forum.jsp?forum=430&cat=24

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/r/rad/?S_TACT=105AGX15&S_CMP=LP

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/downloads/index.html

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Migration from IBM Rational Application Developer Version ...public.dhe.ibm.com/software/dw/rational/pdf/RAD_PortalMigration.pdf · IBM® Rational® Application Developer Version