Lightweight portal server for WebSphere Portal development?

Question

I'm doing some portlet development for IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1. However, the deployment process is painfully slow. As this is my first time doing portlet development, I'm not too familiar with the various portal servers out there. I'd like some recommendations for a lightweight portal server on which I can deploy quickly for development.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with each of their deployment characteristics, but here is a list of open source portals in Java: http://java-source.net/open-source/portals

Answer 2

I believe Liferay has become Sun's adopted strategy, if that has any bearing.

Answer 3

I was in a similar situation a year or two ago.

The server takes a long time to come up regardless, but it doesn't actually have to be restarted with any little change. You only have to restart the server with major changes, otherwise, restart or redeploy the project to the server.

Nevertheless, the system wasn't snappy until I had three gigs of ram. I'd recommend first upgrading your workstation to support the server. They're called workstation class systems for a reason :) Get yourself an 8gb machine and tell your boss you will be twice as productive :)

Answer 4

I typically use hotdeployment of changes Java classes and JSP pages. This is the fastest way. We shared 1 server with 5 developers using hotdeployment of classes to PortalServer/installedApps/.ear/yourportlet.war and this worked great. However, now and then we did have to restart the server. If you changed deployement descriptors you still need to re-deploy the portlet WAR. Make sure the reloadingEnabled flag is set to false for the wps.war app on your development machine (restart picks up the change).

Answer 5

Pluto is the answer!

http://portals.apache.org/pluto/

I'm very happy now. :)