WebSphere related

Roller Weblogger and WebSphere

Here is some tricks and hints about migrating Roller Weblogger to WebSphere. I hope it would help people run other sophisticated web applications on this platform.

• First of all I fix web.xml - delete some tags related to Resin, comments, etc. and add references to resources (database, mail, taglibs). Generally, xdoclet generation is much better way to produce descriptors, but in my case where's a lot of things to be edited to get one file web.xml .
• Tag libraries. There's a lot of problem trying WebSphere to work with them. Foolproof method is to get all tld's in folder in WEB-INF , link location to them in web.xml and check uri in jsp files with web.xml . It's easy thing, but more strict than standart, so it often happened that some apps work on Tomcat and don't work on WebSphere.
• Logging and other properties. Log4j properties use file in Tomcat base. I put org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender instead.
• Internationalization. By default, Websphere use different code pages for locales. I run it with parameter -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8 for Generic JVM Arguments. It is a most radical way to force WebSphere use UTF-8 for all web apps. If ekit applet run without locale parameter it use client language to show menu from resource bundle.
• Hibernate. Besides providing jndi reference to database it's a good idea to additionally configure JTA and caching.
• Authorisation and authentification. Permit all that not forbidden in web.xml. Roller use own database for storing users and roles. In my case I have custom users registry, and suppose that only that users will have an access to blog. So, button register ask user to its custom login and password and put his own data into database. The primordial idea is to put blog editor functionality in portlets. In general case, of course it need to be changed.

posted by s-chro @ 2:33 PM