The quest for the Java Portal - Compiling Liferay

I got some weird exceptions with JBoss Portal, so, I decided to play around with Liferay. I have it running on my shared JBoss, and I have some ideas to their structured articles feature, so I will try harder on Liferay.

I've decided to check the bootlenecks on Liferay, because it is too slow. I'll use NetBeans Profiler. Using NB's ability to create projects using existing Ant scripts, I've done some setup:

1. Create an Java Application project using an already existing Ant script;
2. Add all "src" folder to the source folders list - about 20 of them (I guess this isn't necessary unless we want to change anything);
3. Adjust compilation build to the "start" target and run to "deploy" (Liferay does not set "start" as dependency to "deploy");
   
4. Create a "build.[user|computer].properties" and "app.server.[user|computer].properties" to customize some build parameters. I dislike Jikes, so, I'm using "javac.compiler=modern". The rest of properties are straighforward to customize, but folders on app.server must be correctly configured - JBoss predefined values does not work on an out-of-box installation;
5. After building a lot of modules (about 10 minutes on an almost empty Windows box powered by an Athlon XP 3200+), more than 2000 classes - yes, two thousands - are compiled without errors. Running the "deploy" target will install Liferay on JBoss. It installs some JARs on server's lib folder - I will change this later, before uploading to the real server.

Now, you can run JBoss. But first, some one-time configuration:

1. Add a datasource. To use profiling, I created a memory-only HSQLDB:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <datasources>
   <local-tx-datasource>
     <jndi-name>jdbc/LiferayPool</jndi-name>
     <connection-url>jdbc:hsqldb:.</connection-url>
     <driver-class>org.hsqldb.jdbcDriver</driver-class>
     <user-name>sa</user-name>
     <password></password>
   </local-tx-datasource>
   </datasources>

2. Use NetBeans Profiler (Profile | Attach Profiler) to prepare a special run script to active profiling on JBoss - this file will be called "run-nbprofiler".

Now, we have an working environment. Next step is test and profile.