So at work I am in the final stages of setting up Liferay 5.2 for our intranet. Version 5.2 is much better than 5.1. It has an added control panel so you no longer need to make your own section. It also has support for separate database servers for read and write. This will allow me to add slave database servers if ever needed. Currently I have two servers setup. One in Germany and the other in Texas. The Mysql circular replication running behind the scenes seems to run flawlessly. When setting up Liferauy to be clustered you need to make sure you setup the ehcache and the Jackrabit document library to be clustered. The document library portlet needs to be setup to store documents in a separate database in mysql. I am sure this is slower than the file system but seems to work well in a clustered environment. My last tasks in getting this up and running company wide is to migrate the data and to get the search index to work in a clustered environment. The search engine should be easy but was spitting errors in 5.1 when converting it to the database. I am hoping I have better luck in 5.2. So over all Liferay is a very good cost effective portal platform. Sure beats spending mucho bucks on IBM's Websphere Portal. Hopefully in the coming weeks I will write a tutorial on how to integrate/interface portlets with Domino over DIIOP.

I have been working on quite a bit for awhile but have been slaking on the blog. My newest project to be added to my huge list of todo items is a MythTV box. The box will double as a home backup server. The system is all built and functions pretty good. It has a 2.2ghz Pentium Dual, 2 GB of ram, and about 650 GB of hard drive space on two drives. I decided to use SUSE 11.1 as my distro of Linux. I mainly picked SUSE since Yast makes everything easy and I deal with it a lot at work. So far so good. Samba is up and running after over coming a firewall issue with Netbios. MythTV is installed and running but needs a great deal of tweaking. I also have to start looking for a nice dual HD tv tuner card and also an infrared receiver for the serial port. I thought of building an IR from parts at Radioshak but it might be easier to buy on ebay. So I just wanted to say that I am alive and busy.

So recently I decided to drop using Java Server Faces for the new project's framework that I am working on. I think JSF is nice but a little too automatic. I like to have a little bit more control on functionality. I think this will end up helping me build an application that is more optimized and lighter on the server. I am now planning to stick to standard JSP and JSTL for the business logic. I will still be sticking to hibernate for data persistence. This will most likely add some extra work but will create a better product in the long run.

Last night I reactivated comments on the site after setting up a CAPTCHA plugin. The plugin was very easy to install but did require me to make some slight modifications to the web server. The whole install process should have been easy but I could not figure why YUM could not download the installer. The solution was quite easy and it dumb founded that it did not occur to me at first that I blocked the connection with my iptables. So I fist needed to open my firewall to YUM the GD php and then re-close it after installation. Anyway everything seems fine now and ready for me to move on to other tasks.

So, I finally got around to uploading my old portfolio website. I do plan on eventually redoing it but I needed atleast some place to point people in the mean time. I decided to set it up as a sub-domain for easy access. One of the great features of running your own web server is the ability to setup things how they make sense to you and not a hosting company. So if you want to see some of my old work check out the link below.

http://portfolio.sharperconcepts.com

Also on another note I have had to turn off anonymous comments do to some abusive hackers out there. I should have seen it comming and really did not cause any issues on the site but none the less it pointed out a hole in this Nucleus blogger. So for now comments will remain off until I get a CAPTCHA put on the form to limit the abuse.

I know I have neglected posting for the last several days. I have been busy with work and such. Recently I have been working on trouble shooting an issue with authentication using realms in Tomcat 6. Their is some sort of logic issue with my code that hashes the password twice. Meaning it hashes it and then hashes it again. Now I am in a debate to weather I should write code to protect this issue, figure out why my hash method is being called twice, or both. Well this post will be short but I am thinking about writing a tutorial to cover authentication with JDBCrealms.

So I have been working with Liferay for the last couple months. It is a great piece of software especially for being free. Though with any complex application it can frustrate you having to deal with bugs or trying to mold it into company's requirements. So I am trying to get this site to go live at the end of the week. Here is a quick list of issues I have run into while trying to setup version 5.2.2.

1. Accessing internet through proxy server. It seems like the Liferay box would not take the proxy settings so I by passed it by setting up the entire Tomcat server.


2. Multiple file upload for the document and photo libraries. This functionality does not work on our production server but works locally. I am a little baffled by this.


3. Creating RSS feeds from Journal entries. This might be me having a lack of understanding the Journal CMS. I still have to look more into how everything works. To my understanding it kind of looks like I have to do some sort of XSL transformation. Thought from what I can see the CMS looks really powerful, maybe too powerful for my companies needs.

So I think all in all Liferay is really cool. I have been able to get it to successfully integrate with our LDAP and Domino environment. Liferay's built in LDAP support was very flexible in importing user data on login. This keeps a clean list of active users and will update with changes occur in the LDAP. Integrating Domino databases was fairly easy since everything is Java. So far I have written two fairly simple portlets to display and enter Domino documents. This is done fairly easy by using the Notes.jar and accessing the Domino server over DIIOP. I still have plan to write a portlet to interface with our Domino document libraries. I do not think it will be very difficult since I will only have users be able to view/browse documents.

So I will try to list some more thoughts on my Liferay experience here later on and perhaps some pointers on how I have over come issues.

It has been a while since I last posted so I kind of felt like I should add some sort of blurb. It has been a busy week at work. I am in the process of implementing a new intranet based off the Liferay portal. It is a very cool portal, probably the best I have worked with. The great aspect of it is that it is free, which I can definitely not say about IBM's Websphere portal. Anyways I have a development machine setup running the portal on Tomcat 6.0 and MySQL. This first server will just be released to a small number of employees. My goal is to setup a cluster of 2-3 app servers and a database server to go live for US employees by year end. I am guessing it will not be ready until the end of January.

I almost have the branding of this website done and hopefully I will do the modification by the end of the the weekend. The look will reflect the old portfolio website so it will not be too fancy. I have also taken a little break in development to concentrate on backing stuff up. I figured it took so long to setup this server that I should back it up. Backups are so boring. Most of the time you never need them.

I have a new website idea that I have been working on which involves user realms. I have been working on implementing management of these users with hibernate. Hibernate has a little bit of a learning curve but is truly powerful for managing and accessing persistent data. As, I have been developing this application I stumbled/googled upon a great example of how to use hibernate for storing relational data.

Hibernate Many-to-Many Tutorial

Well, anyways check out this tutorial. I wanted to post a link to it to give it some props. If I keep finding great tutorials like this, maybe
I will be able to make my goal to release this new website by the end of the year.

Over that last few days I have been working on setting up this server. Basicly, I moved this site from a shared hosting platform to a virtual private server. Having a VPS is nice since it is flexible to do any thing I want but it also creates extra work that as a developer you get to forget about. Setting up a server correctly is not a quick process.

So this new VPS server that I am building has Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Tomcat running on it. I am actually suprised that it is running pretty good on only 256 mb of ram. But setting up a web server is an endless amount of config files to adjust. I think I am almost done but I am working on perfecting my iptables firewall. This step is kind of risky since thier is a chance of locking my self out of the server. :) I have also ran into an issue with setting up a safe guard in cron so I do not lock my self out. Cron does not seem to want to execute a refresh of the iptable. I am sure I will figure it out tonight.