The quest for the Java Portal - Gridsphere Compilation

Current version of Gridsphere, 3.0.3, supports Tomcat and Jetty only. Since I'm extreme (-lly nuthead), I've tryed to run it on JBoss. I haven't found any live demo on its site - too bad.

Like Jetspeed and eXo, there's no WAR/EAR/SAR/CAR/etcAR file to download - I must download the source and compile (there's a corrupted, hidden WAR file on server, if you edit by hand the URL of download). Good news is: it uses Ant (not Maven) - that means I does not need to dig into obscure and unstructured XML. IMHO, Maven is good for the main developer, but not for the bug hunters, like me.

As expected, it wasn't straightforward. The steps:

1. Set CATALINA_HOME to JBoss' server folder - "$JBOSSHOME/server/$instance". Compilation script needs a "lib" folder with JavaEE API. Tomcat 5 stores on "$C_H/common/lib", Tomcat 6 stores on "$C_H/lib". Gridsphere "detects" tomcat version by verifying if "$C_H/common/lib" exists.
   
2. This leads to a "$C_H/bin" not found. After some digging in build scripts (I love Ant), I found an strange task that adds Tomcat's bin dir to classpath:

   110 <fileset dir="${appserver.home}/bin/">
   111     <include name="*.jar">
   112 </fileset>
   

3. Removing it and running the undocumented "ant war" task, creates the web archive.
4. The archive will not deploy: a ClassNotFoundException nested in a WSException. The class that was not found was the CaptchaServlet. The CNFE is strange, since the class is on "WEB-INF/lib" folder. Since I will not allow new users, I removed the reference from web.xml, but the same exception was thrown, with class GridSphereServlet.

At this point, I got tired of editing files by hand, and I created a NetBeans project to handle everything to me. This is the approach I'm doing with Liferay, and, likewise, I found a lot of dependencies, like Castor (yet another binding framework), JFreeChart, and others.

BTW, JFreeChart deserves some lines. First, I thought one of JFree JAR files were corrupt in GS distribution. I've decided to download it from JFree site and I can't see the documentation because IT IS NOT FREE. Yup. I can download the sources, but not the developer documentation.

And, like every giant project, I found useless things, like Perl5Util. I don't want to discuss if P5U is useful, but use it to replace regex like "\.xml$" with "" is a waste of resources, since String.replaceFirst can do the job.

Finally, I could compile with zero errors (and a lot of unchecked warnings). But it didn't run. I got an weird exception in Castor. After some reverse engineering, since there isn't architetural documentation, I found I need to add six XML files to their correct folders. In original GS structure, these XML lies on a "config" dir, but are copied to different folders by one of the 10 Ant scripts. Copying them made a deployable WAR file.

This is a thumbs up no NetBeans: users will always have an well organized project structure. There are no lost files on lost folders needing a lost task on a lost script to copy them to the correct place.

BTW, the problem was a static Class.getResource returning null. I had to change the code (adding some assertions) to figure it out.

Tip to Gridsphere team: use NetBeans to manage the project...