WebSphere Portal v7 and the Web Application Integrator portlet - no success thus far

Continuing my exploration of the newly released WebSphere Portal v7, I thought I'd see whether I could get the Web Application Integrator portlet to work.

Now before I start, it's worth remembering that, currently, WAI is only supported with WebSphere Portal 6.1.0.4 and below - it's not yet been updated to support v7.

It started well; I expanded the ZIP: -

-rwxrwxrwx 1 1000 1000 231572 Jan 13  2009 webappintegrator_for_Portal_6_1.ZIP

into /root on my portal server, copied the ConfigEngine script: -

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2763 Feb 20  2008 /root/wai_install/deployWebAppIntegrator.xml

into the appropriate directory: -

/opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/ConfigEngine/config/includes/

and then installed it using ConfigEngine: -

cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/ConfigEngine
./ConfigEngine.sh -DWasPassword=passw0rd -DPortalAdminPwd=passw0rd -DWebAppIntegratorLocation=/root/wai_install/

When I logged back into WebSphere Portal, and navigated to Administration -> Manage Pages, I was sad to see that the normal WAI user interface did not appear in its normal place under the Manage Pages portlet.

Recalling a recent conversation with a colleague about WAI and Virtual Portals, and referencing an older blog post of mine, I tried an alternate angle of attack; using XMLAccess to deploy it to the appropriate pages: -

cd /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/wp_profile/PortalServer/bin/
./xmlaccess.sh -in /root/wai_install/addWAItoManagePages.xml -user padmin -password passw0rd -url http://localhost:10039/wps/config

This initially failed, because the XMLAccess script couldn't find the WAR file :-

...
     <message id="EJPXA0107E">com.ibm.wps.command.xml.XmlCommandException: EJPXA0107E: The resource for the URL file:////opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/installableApps/WebAppIntegrator.war could not be read. [web-app uid=webappintegrator.WebAppIntegratorPortlet.dbcf144b21.webmod]</message>
        <message>java.io.FileNotFoundException: /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/installableApps/WebAppIntegrator.war (No such file or directory)</message>
...

so, approaching desperation, I manually copied the WAR file, WebAppIntegrator.war, from /root/wai_install to /opt/IBM/WebSphere/PortalServer/installableApps.

I then re-ran the same XMLAccess command, which completed normally: -

<status element="all" result="ok"/>

and, joy of joy, the WAI UI appeared in its rightful place under the Manage Pages portlet.

Sadly, when I attempted to generate the JavaScript that I'd normally insert into my to-be-integrated page, I was instead redirected an error page, containing: -

Error 500: java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: com/ibm/wps/state/accessors/url/URLContextConstants.FORCE_ABSOLUTE_URLS

Ah, well, I did try.

As I mentioned, WAI is not (yet) supported under WebSphere Portal 7 - I'll endeavour to find out if/when, and report back.

*UPDATE 24/11/2010* I've now learned that Web Application Integrator for WP7 will shortly be made available via the Catalog. I've tested it internally, and it works as one would expect.