Thanks to Pluto and ServletUnit

Over the last year the project I lead has been working in Vignette Application Portal writing their proprietary "portal beans". Our team experienced some productivity issues in developing these portal beans. A lot of time was spent getting things deployed and restarted before we were able to test our code changes.

For the next release of our software we needed a better way to develop and test. We are now converting to JSR-168 portlets that are deployed to WebLogic and consumed by an instance of Vignette Application Portal. To speed development and testing, we have put together a development environment using Pluto as the portlet container and driving it with ServletUnit and jUint. This allows us to perform unit tests on the code and to drive the portlets without needing to deploy to WebLogic.

Although portlets are similar to servlets, portlets expect the environment to be configured in a certain way. So portletUnit was written to configure ServletUnit so that that Pluto and the portlet get what they need to run correctly. Currently, we can run tests on a simple VIEW portlet in Pluto then deploy the same portlet to Vignette by only changing the web.xml and running Vignette's packaging tool.