Wednesday, 16 July 2008

WebSphere Portlet Factory on Linux ........... wooo, my life just got a whole lot better

As per my earlier posts, I'm in the transition phase from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. One of the final challenges was that I had to boot into Windows in order to use WebSphere Portlet Factory Designer.

Well, one more obstacle has been removed with the recent release of WebSphere Portlet Factory 6.1.

It's worth noting that IBM does not formally support WebSphere Portlet Factory on Ubuntu - the two supported Linux platforms are: -
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise SLED 10
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 5.1
as per the Announcement Letter here.

In my particular case, I'm using WebSphere Dashboard Framework (WDF), which extends WebSphere Portlet Factory (WPF) with a set of dashboarding capabilities, including my favourite - the Summary and Drilldown builder.

I went to the software catalogue, and searched for WebSphere Dashboard Framework. This returned: -

IBM WebSphere Dashboard Framework 6.1 Multiplatform Multilingual eAssembly (CR5PMML)

which contained: -

IBM WebSphere Dashboard Framework 6.1 Multiplatform Multilingual (C13T6ML)
   
Size     477mb
Date posted     30-Jun-2008
       
IBM WebSphere Dashboard Framework 6.1 Linux Installer Multilingual (C1J1FML)

Size     197mb
Date posted     03-Jul-2008

and downloaded the latter as C1J1FML.zip.

It's worth noting that the Linux version is way smaller than its Windows counterpart, because IBM does not package Eclipse or WebSphere Application Server Community Edition with the Linux download.

Therefore, I needed to download and install Eclipse 3.3.2 before proceeding.

I made a few mistakes here; I used Synaptic Package Manager which installed a slimmed down version of Eclipse, which didn't include the necessary Java development tools.

In the end, I downloaded: -

eclipse-jee-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz

from here: -

http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/technology/epp/downloads/release/europa/winter/eclipse-jee-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz&url=ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.eclipse.org/eclipseMirror/technology/epp/downloads/release/europa/winter/eclipse-jee-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz&mirror_id=96

I then extracted Eclipse into /opt/eclipse: -

mkdir /opt/eclipse
cd /opt/eclipse
tar -xvzf eclipse-jee-europa-winter-linux-gtk.tar.gz

Once this was done, I extracted the WDF ZIP file into /tmp to find two files: -

WDF.bin
installer.properties

The .bin file should be an executable file - in my case, ls -al WDF.bin returns: -

-rw-r--r-- 1 hayd hayd 219263608 2008-06-22 22:59 WDF.bin

which meant that I had to change the file attributes to make it so: -

chmod +x WDF.bin

ls -al WDF.bin

-rwxr-xr-x 1 hayd hayd 219263608 2008-06-22 22:59 WDF.bin

before I could execute it: -

sudo ./WDF.bin

Preparing to install...
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
Unpacking the JRE...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...

Launching installer...

The GUI installer is pretty simple, and merely asks for two locations; one for WPF ( /opt/IBM/WebSpherePortletFactory ) and one for Eclipse ( /opt/eclipse ).

I've taken screenshots of these, and will upload them when I get some time.

Having completed the installation, I was able to use WPF/WDF to create a project, model etc.

My next challenge is to install WAS CE or similar as a J2EE runtime/test environment.

More to follow ...........

4 comments:

jwylie said...

It's good to be happy Dave!

Unknown said...

I never made it to install portlet factory on my ubuntu open client without this description. Thanks very much this article helped me out. WAS CE also works now.

Unknown said...

Hi Dave,

Great post. Thanks for this!

It looks like I'm a bit late to the party and realize that your experience installing WPF on Ubuntu may be dated.

I tried following your instructions and fell a bit short. I get as far as being able to see the WPF perspective and creating a new WPF project, but when I do that, all the WPF artifacts are missing from the project(which means I cannot even create a new model).

My gut tells me it's because I haven't installed all the required plugins (i.e., Web Tools). Could you please shed more light on what you needed to download and install as far as those plugins are concerned?

Thanks in advance,
Mike

நிசாந்தன் said...

plz can you give me the download link of "IBM WebSphere Dashboard Framework 6.1 Linux Installer Multilingual (C1J1FML)".

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