I had to install the Blogs portlet in Liferay.

Liferay is the all purpose portal framework that Chemtech uses to build its website.

The Liferay portal already deployed on production server is the 3.4.5 version. When I tried to add the Blogs portlet through the Add Content menu option I couldn’t find it.

Googling about Liferay’s Blogs portlet didn’t help me. The only positive clue I had was

Liferay Portal Administrator's Guide, Third Edition

(page 124) which has a section dedicated to the Blogs portlet.

I tried to understand why the Blogs portlet wasn’t available in the Add Content window:

Was it because the blogs portlet didn’t make it into the version 4.3.5 of the portal? The answer is no. The blogs portlet is available in version 4.3.5 (with limitations if compared to the Blogs portlet of today’s Liferay version that is currently 5.2.3).

After a little bit of more googling I found Development in the ext environment wiki article. I read in item 4 that you can turn portlets you want to deploy on/off by editing the file

\ext\ext-web\docroot\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml

Mine was located in

E:\chemsite\tomcat\webapps\lportal\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml

I did just that turning the Blogs portlet ON setting the <include> property to true:

<!--
    Liferay Portlets

    To create a minimal installation of Liferay so that only the essential Liferay portlets are available, uncomment the following block and set the include attribute to false for the portlets you want to remove. To make a portlet available, set the include attribute to true. The struts-path attribute is shown so that it's easier for the editor of this file to associate a portlet id with a portlet.
-->

<portlet>
          <portlet-name>33</portlet-name>
          <struts-path>blogs</struts-path>
          <include>true</include>
</portlet>

I then rerun Liferay portal using Eclipse. For my surprise I could find the Collaboration category in the Add Content window with the Blogs entry available:

Hope this shortens the path when you come to need to turn a portlet on/off.

During the second half of July and the first half of August I was working on Chemtech's site doing some maintenance. It was a good job because I could get to know new technology as is the case of Liferay. Liferay is a great enterprise portal that allows you to create a complete website solution coded in Java.

I also could verify the quality of the new Eclipse 3.5 IDE codenamed Galileo that I used during the maintenance. It's a great IDE to Java developers. It has lots of plugins that allow you to work with practically any kind of programming technology inside a fantastic set of windows for every type of task. Before using Eclipse I had only worked with NetBeans to do Java development.

I improved my skills about Tomcat too.

During a time like this you accelerate the learning process and get to know new things which are very important for any software developer.

After fixing some bugs on the site and writing in chemsite’s project wiki everything I grasped and did I came back to Volta Redonda for a two week job on CSN's MES; more on this in the next post.

You see, for the past 10 months I’ve worked with ASP.NET and Oracle (Braskem) and then I switched to work with Java and MySQL for 1 month (chemsite). Now at CSN I'm working with Visual Basic and SQL Server.

This shows that in today's world there's no bullet proof technology when we talk about programming languages and database systems. Each company has its own legacy systems that date back to two or one decade ago and such systems require certain types of interfaces developed in certain types of technologies. For example, if you look to 10 years ago (1999), C# wasn't even a programming language and so Visual Basic predominated during that time. It is most of the times impossible to a company to redevelop a really big system in a new programming language that is today's bullet proof. Those big systems consumed a lot of time and money to be constructed and in the future the programming language that is today’s bullet proof may not stand out.

As software professional you must act with any tool that is put in your hands.

I like what I do and no matter the tool I use I'm always satisfied with my job because of course, I do what I like to do, that is, software development.

To explain why Chemtech is a great place to work for in Brazil I think the above text says it all. In just 1 year I had the opportunity to work in different projects that use different technologies. A great way to leverage a career.

Thanks Jesus for that! :)