Portlet development overview

The IBM® Rational® Software Development Platform includes tools designed to help you develop portlet applications for WebSphere® Portal. The portlet tools provide the following capabilities:

The following environments are supported for testing and debugging portlets:

Tool support

The following tools are provided to support development of your portlet applications:

Portlet project

Portlet projects are used for developing portlet applications in the product workbench. These projects contain all of the necessary resources for testing, debugging, or deploying a portlet. To create a portlet application, you must either create a portlet project using the New Portlet Project wizard, or import a portlet WAR file using the Import wizard.

For general information about portlet projects, see Creating portlets and portlet projects.

New Portlet Project wizard

You can create a new portlet application by using the new portlet project wizards from the File > New > Project menu. Choose Portlet Project or Portlet Project (JSR 168), depending on whether you want to use the IBM portlet API or JSR 168 portlet API. The wizard that opens will prompt you to select one of the following portlet types:

For more information, see Creating portlet projects (IBM API) or Creating portlet projects (JSR 168) for the Empty and Basic portlets. See Creating Faces portlet projects for information specific to a Faces portlet and Creating Struts portlet projects for information specific to a Struts portlet.

Portlet deployment descriptor editor

A Portlet project has two configuration files: the portlet deployment descriptor (portlet.xml) and the Web application deployment descriptor (web.xml). The portlet deployment descriptor contains the information that WebSphere Portal needs to install and configure the portlet. To learn more about the portlet deployment descriptor, see  Working with portlet deployment descriptors. This portlet deployment descriptor editor helps you to specify deployment information in the Portlet deployment descriptor. It can also validate the portlet.xml file. To learn more about this editor, see Customizing IBM API portlets or Customizing JSR 168 portlets.

Portal server configuration

Portlet tools provide an additional type of server configuration, called the portal server configuration, which contains the server configuration information needed to publish your portlet application on a WebSphere Portal machine. After it is published, your target portlet will appear on a preview page of your WebSphere Portal server. Source-level debugging is also supported. For further information, see Defining local servers for testing portlets or Defining remote servers for testing portlets.

To test and debug your portlet project, refer to Testing and debugging portlets.

Test and deploy on a remote server

The capability to test or debug on a remote WebSphere Portal Server Attach server allows you to preview a portlet application during development. This is a dynamic view of the portlet application running on WebSphere Portal. When running on a remote server, use of this action will remove the necessity to manually build, install, and deploy applications to the remote WebSphere Portal. The preview automatically executes these operations for you. For details, see Testing portlets on remote servers. In the WebSphere Studio versions of this product, this function was called portlet preview.

Importing and exporting to the Web Archive (WAR) file

Since a portlet application project is a J2EE-compliant Web application, you can import resources from a WAR file to your project by selecting File > Import, and you can export resources in your project to a WAR file by selecting File > Export.

Related concepts
Portal Tools overview
Portal development overview
Related tasks
Portlet applications
Developing portlets
Testing and debugging portlets
Profiling portlets
Publishing portlets

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