Weather Portlet

About this JA-SIG Portlet Project

• The JA-SIG Weather Portlet is a fully functional JSR-168 portlet that provides international weather courtesy of AccuWeather.com. Users have the ability add and delete multiple locations and standards of measurement with ease! This portlet is well coded, tested, and production ready.

  Adopters of this portlet Are you using this portlet? List yourself below and help JA-SIG & the author of this portlet to gauge its usage. Southern Utah University Saint Paul Public Schools South Dakota State University Yale University Texas Tech University Fort Lewis College

Configuration

• The JA-SIG Weather Portlet only requires you to add the stylesheet (it'll work without it but its going to be ugly!). The styling information is located in webapp/css/weather.css. Note: that you must redeploy uPortal after adding the stylesheet.
  • On a vanilla install of uPortal 2.6.x, you can simply add the weather.css to 'webpages/media/org/jasig/portal/layout/tab-column/xhtml-theme/common/' and add @import url("weather.css"); to webpages/media/org/jasig/portal/layout/tab-column/xhtml-theme/common/channels.css
  • On a vanilla install of uPortal 3.0.x, you can simply add the weather.css to 'webapp/media/skins/universality/uportal3' and add @import url("weather.css"); to webapp/media/skins/universality/uportal3/uportal3.css
  • On a vanilla install of uPortal 2.5.x, it gets a little more tricky than just adding the stylesheet. There is a bug with the way pre-uPortal 2.6.x deploys portlets documented at UP-1241. The problem lies in the way that deployPortletApp modifies the web.xml. It adds a 2.3 servlet DTD and the Weather Portlet requires a 2.4 servlet DTD.
    • A simple fix is as follows:
      • Open the deployed web.xml (tomcat-dir/webapps/WeatherPortlet/web.xml if you use tomcat) and change
        • <!DOCTYPE web-app PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
          "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd ">
          <web-app>
      • to ...
        • <web-app version="2.4" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
          xmlns:xsi=" http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee
          http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">
  • I have not tested other portal environments, please feel free to add instructions or contact me if you run this on another portal environment.
• If you wish, advanced configuration is possible; see the Advanced Configuration section below.

Building

• Building is very easy. With Maven installed simply type 'mvn package' at the command line and a WeatherPortlet.war will be built for you.

Deploying

• Deploying to uPortal is equally as easy. Simply run 'ant deployPortletApp -DportletApp=/path/to/war/WeatherPortlet.war' from your uPortal installation directory.

Advanced Configuration

• Choosing an XML retrieving implementation
  • The JA-SIG Weather Portlet comes with two implementations by default: DOM4J or Xstream(Default)
  • To configure DOM4J or Xstream(Default) simply uncomment one line and comment out the other line in applicationContext.xml and testContext.xml
• Adding default locations
  • To have a default location appear (such as the hometown of where the portal runs) simply add those locations to the portlet.xml
  • The portlet.xml has instructions and two locations commented out by default to guide you in this process.
• Adjusting the caching configuration
  • The JA-SIG Weather Portlet comes pre-configured with an optimal caching configuration using EHCache & the Spring Modules.
  • To adjust the caching configuration, simply edit the ehcache.xml file. Most of the parameters in the file are self-explanatory or commented.
  • If you would like to add additional caches, simply add the cache configuration to the ehcache.xml, add the cache name to the configuration options in the applicationContext.xml, and add @Cachable (look at IWeatherDAO for an example) to the method name you would like to be cached.

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Objectives and requirements

Functional

• Can retrieve international weather and display weather information in a user friendly format

Technical

• A standards-compliant JSR-168 portlet
• Modular design and APIs so additional weather service plugins may be implemented
• Uses Spring PortletMVC and appropriate Spring practices
• Builds with Maven 2
• Unit tested

Cultural

• A collaborative open source project under the auspices of JA-SIG
• Can be used commercially (with permission, see termsofuse.txt) and non-commercially (without permission)
• Produces actual production-ready releases, not just a code drop or a project that exclusively lives in SVN

Participants

• Dustin Schultz - Lead Developer
• Erin Garlock - Interested Participant
• Brad Johnson - Branch Committer
• Jen Bourey - Branch Committer
• ...

Committers

Here are enumerated the people believed to be committers for this WeatherPortlet project:

• Dustin Schultz
• Brad Johnson - texastech-noaa-maven branch
• Jen Bourey - yale-yahoo branch

Action Items