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Recently, I had a task to build a HelloWorld portlet deployed to a liferay portal server.  I looked around, couldn't find any up to date blog entries that really covered this topic.  After I went through the startup pain, I figured I'd share my findings.

The examples below work on Mac OS X v10.5.6 using Java 1.6.

I followed these steps to get it working.

First major step is to get Glassfish working with Liferay on your Mac:

1. Download the Liferay portal bundled with Glassfish from http://downloads.sourceforge.net/lportal/liferay-portal-glassfish-darwin-5.2.2.jar.
2. Follow the Quick Installation Instructions - Installing GlassFish from a JAR file from Liferay, with the following additional steps:
1. To finish the Liferay installation, you need to start up the Glassfish app server.  The following command will work, assuming you did not change the domain name in the setup.xml file:
   
   $ ./bin/asadmin start-domain domain1
2. Look in the log files:
   
   $ tail -f domains/domain1/logs/server.log
   
   Look for these kind of entries:
   
   [AutoDeploy] Selecting file /Users/ashamash/projects/omalley/liferay-portlet/glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy/liferay-portal.war for autodeployment.
   
3. Ultimately, you will see an error message:
   
   java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.apache.xml.utils.DefaultErrorHandler.<init>(Z)V
           at org.apache.xalan.processor.TransformerFactoryImpl.<init>(TransformerFactoryImpl.java:1002)
   
   
4. Stop the application server:
   
   $ ./bin/asadmin stop-domain domain1
   
5. Copy the following libraries into the ./lib directory:
   
   $ cd domains/domain1/applications/j2ee-modules/liferay-portal/WEB-INF/lib/
   $ cp xercesImpl.jar serializer.jar xalan.jar ../../../../../../../lib
   $ cd ../../../../../../..
   
6. Start the application server again.  It should start up OK this time.
   
   $ ./bin/asadmin start-domain domain1
   
7. Be patient, it takes 30-60 seconds to start up Liferay.
   
8. Now, you can navigate to your portal at http://localhost:8080/.
   
3. Now that you have Liferay working for you, you can log in via the credentials provided on the Quick Start Guide:
   
   • Email address: bruno@7cogs.com
   • Password: bruno

You are now ready to build your first HelloWorld portlet.  I did this with Netbeans and the Portal Pack.  Follow these steps:

1. Start with Netbeans 6.5
2. Add the Portal Pack.  I did this by downloading portal-pack-plugin-3_0_all.zip from the Portal Pack downloads page.
   
3. Go through the Getting Started with Portal Pack 3.0 tutorial, it's really good, it took me a grand total of 10 minutes to build the HelloWorld portlet.

The advantage of using a Netbeans Portal Pack is that Netbeans takes care of all the packaging and deployment stuff for you.  I was able to build, deploy, and run my portlet simply by running the project.  Pretty neat stuff.