Automating Portlet Deployment to WebSphere Portal Server 6.1

Question

I've recently started on a project to develop some portlets which will run on IBM WebSphere Portal Server 6.1.

Does anyone know of any scripts, Ant tasks, Maven plugins, etc. for publishing a portlet to Portal Server? In the WebSphere Portlet Factory plugin for eclipse it is possible to "publish" a portlet project to Portal Server instance, however I'd like to know what's going on underneath the hood here (or at least how to replicate the behaviour) so that I can do it in other places (i.e. from continuous integration server).

UPDATE: From what I've read it sounds like the Portlet Factory publishes using a WebSphere JMX client. Does anyone know where I can find more details on this?

Answer 1

I found some documentation on the WebSphere Portal site entitled "Portal administration tools" which lists a few options:

• The portal administration portlets.
• The portal XML configuration interface.
• The Portal Scripting Interface.
• The portal ReleaseBuilder.

The XML configuration interface and the scripting interface sound like they might be what I'm looking for, as these could easily be called from an automated process.

I also found an example of a Java program which uses the WebSphere JMX interface, however I don't know if this would also work for WebSphere Portal...

Answer 2

You can also use tooling for automated deployment.

Take a look at Deployit from Xebialabs. On http://www.xebialabs.com you can download a free version for WAS and they also have a plug-in for Portal.