How to Install JBoss Enterprise Portal 5

Hi, and welcome to another JBoss video tutorial. In this video, what we're going to do is take a look at installing the Enterprise Portal Platform version 5, as well as starting it up and then creating our first instance of a new portal, and then adding a page to that portal and maybe a couple gadgets to that page, just so you can kind of see a pretty easy, simple flow of events for managing and administering the portal. So let's go ahead and get started. First thing you'll have to do is go out to your CSP and download the portal software. So just either contact your rep if you don't know how to do that, or go to the email that you got once you subscribed, and it will point you to that location. Once it's— once you go to the CSP, you'll Download it and it downloads as a zip file. So you'll simply have to extract that to a directory. Now you cannot extract it to a directory that has any spaces in it. So for example, I tried to extract it here, but because Dropbox is a directory and it has a space in it, it did not work well. So make sure you install it to a directory that doesn't have spaces, or I should say extract it to a directory that doesn't have spaces. Spaces in it. Once it's extracted, you'll see several different directory structures. We're going to be launching the portal, um, and as you can see here, it's based on Enterprise Application Platform 5, so it is a hosted platform, which basically means that EAP is, as you can see here, a main part of the portal. So the JBoss AS, if you're familiar with the application platform, will be pretty familiar to you. We'll go into the bin directory and launch it just like we would EAP, uh, except because of the resources running within it, it will be launching Portal. So let's take a look at it. I like to launch my applications from a terminal window, so I'm gonna go ahead and cd over to that directory, um, and inside of JBoss there's the application server directory and the bin directory. So once I'm in that directory, I'm going to launch the standard run script, run.sh. Now if I wanted to, I could execute a configuration parameter and provide a configuration directory that I want it to run in, but because it's the first time I've ever launched it, I think it's a good idea to just run with the default until you're, until you've gotten your feet wet and you're pretty comfortable with those configurations. So we'll go ahead and hit enter and let it start. Now while that is running, it will give us an opportunity to take a look at some of the resources running inside of— or provided by the Application Platform and EPP5. You'll notice inside the server directory, we'll see those server configurations that I mentioned earlier. We are using the default configuration as I did not provide any specific configuration parameter. Couple things I want to bring your attention to is the deploy directory. And inside of that, the application that serves as our portal, which is the GateInEar. So this is where you'll do most of your configuration and customization changes within the portal. So this is a directory structure you want to be very familiar with. Now you'll notice that the portal application has now started, so we're going to go ahead and open up a web browser Launch the portal by simply typing in localhost:8080/portal, and the first time it takes a little bit of time to start up, but as you can see here, we have the Enterprise Portal platform. So this is the homepage. It does provide us the ability to sign in, uh, which we'll use in just a second, as well as the ability to register and to change the language. So registration provides self-service, so when your users end up becoming end users to this portal, they will have the ability to register themselves as well as the ability to change the language. So if I go and take a look at that, that provides the internationalization support in the case that your organization maybe needs to have the portal provided in multiple different languages. So let's go ahead and sign in. Now speaking of signing in, you'll notice here at the bottom of the portal homepage there are a bunch of quick links giving you the ability to log in as a specific type of user very quickly without having to go through a login screen and type it in. It's kind of nice. So what this does is it allows you to participate with the portal as a specific type of user so you can demonstrate the different flexibility and, um, access controls you can have depending on the type of user you are. So there's the administrator, which is who we will be in this demo, but there's also manager and user and demo to give you additional levels of functionality. So certainly when you install this, you should play around with them all. Okay, so let's sign in as root. We'll click on the administrator button, and you'll notice once we're signed in, it'll show root up in the corner, and then it will also show us a new navigation bar. This navigation bar will be available available depending on what access permissions your customers have. So whoever logs in, what will be done is that we will review the access controls— portal reviews the access controls and generates a menu associated with those access permissions. So you'll notice now, right now we're looking at a Portal Private Classic implementation. What we want to do is add another one. So we're looking at a classic portal, we want to add a different one. So let's go ahead and say, um, site. By selecting site, this is kind of the site manager, shows all your different portal instances. Right now we just have Classic. So instead, we will add a new portal. And in creating this portal instance, we'll call it something cool like Terendi. You'll also notice the ability to set permissions for this portal. So if this might be maybe a customer-facing portal, you might make it accessible to everyone. However, if it was maybe internal only, you would be able to go in and add permissions, and that would navigate through your LDAP directory and choose which groups of users get access to it. So it gives you the ability, for example, if you had an organization that maybe had a customer-facing portal, then you might have one for employees, and then you might have one for alumni or people who have worked in your organization before, right? So there's several different options available to you for providing the same portal infrastructure to multiple different aspects of your business. So I'm gonna go ahead and make it available to everyone. Now this is just the access permission, who can see the portal. Another question will be who can edit it, who can add pages, who can add content. So we're gonna go into edit permissions and I'm going to select from an existing set of out-of-the-box users we created for your use. You're normally going to see this combined with your LDAP structure as well. But I'm just gonna choose Platform Administrators. And you'll notice several different roles we've created to help you kind of categorize functionality. I'm gonna say everybody, so any administrator in the portal, on the portal platform, will have the ability to edit this page. So I'll go ahead and say save, and you'll see that portal show up in this list. So now when I go up to the site dropdown, you'll notice Trendy now shows up as one of my sites. So I'm gonna choose the Trendy dropdown. So now you see here the homepage, but the difference is, is in the URL, right? Right now we are actually accessing the Trendy portal. So let's go ahead and add a new page. Under site editor, it gives you the ability to edit existing pages that you are on. So edit page is contextually aware. It means you're going to edit the page that you are on. Add new page will give you the ability to add a page to the page that you are on, so it'll create a nested navigation structure. So I'm gonna go ahead and say Add New Page. Now in this case, I actually don't want it to be a subpage of the Home navigation. I want it to be parallel. So in order to do that, I'm going to select this up arrow and actually shift the navigation up a bit. So I'm gonna call this Trendy Page 1. Give it a name. I'm gonna then say next. So obviously when you see a next button, that usually means that you're in a wizard. So you'll see in the screen we have multiple wizard steps, 3 of them to be exact. So the next step is gonna have us go in and set the layout of the page. So in the layout, you can choose an empty layout which you could do because you are going to be allowed to click and drag and move things around as you see necessary, or you could get a quick page layout by choosing from one of the existing page configurations. Now if I go to Mix Page Configurations, you'll see it gives you the ability to kind of set things up as you'd like. There's 2 rows, 3 columns. I usually like 1 row, 2 columns, so I'm going to start with that. I choose Next, and now the last step is to actually set up the content on the page. So I'm brought to the content, or to the page page display, and it gives me the ability to populate those containers that I just created with content. So what I'm going to do first is take the RSS feed reader and drop it into one. I'm then gonna also take the calendar, drop it into another one, and then I'm going to take the iframe and pull it into another. Now you'll also notice, um, that I have gadgets and portlets gadgets to choose from. This list is populated by a different administrative page called the Application Registry. So if you want to add new gadgets or add new portlets, you can go into the Application Registry and make them available. When you choose the category in which you want to load that portlet or gadget, it will show up here. So these are the categories: Administration, Dashboard, Gadgets, Web. Okay. Now you'll also notice, let's say for example I wanted to drop in the sitemap, as I pull this resource in, it allows me to dynamically change, right, the format of this page. So it's kind of nice because as you, you know, clicking and dragging, I can rearrange the organization of the page without having to do much effort at all. Alright, now you'll also notice an option here to switch to view mode. It allows you to kind of see what the page will look like before you actually save it, which can be really important. So I look at it, looks pretty good. Something that I'm not really fond of is the title bar. So you'll notice the title bar says RSS Reader, Calendar, and iFrame respectively. So I'm going to go back to edit mode by simply selecting Switch View again, and then I'm going to select the little pencil on each portlet. So this gives me the ability to edit the portlets that I choose to. So I'm going to save that one. I'm going to go in here. Save this one. Go in here. That's the blog or the content that we are clipping into this frame. And save. Then I'm gonna go ahead and save the entire page. And you'll notice my trendy page is complete. So what you've seen here is the download of EPP5 as a zip file, extracting it out to a directory, then going into the bin directory. Oh, did I mention Java? Because you want to make sure Java is installed. So if you run into that problem, certainly make sure your JDK is installed. But once you have executed the run script, you can then go into the portal. I showed you how to create a new site called Trendy, create a new portal called Trendy, as well as add a new Trendy page and populate it with portlets. So hopefully you found it helpful, and I look forward to seeing you on the next video. Bye!