I know the name of this site kinda gives away the fact that I'm not a big fan of Oracle Portal. Nonetheless I swear I did not start this Ubuntu project with the intention of slamming Oracle. I just wanted to build myself a little dev Portal box I could use at home.
But of course yesterday I found out I couldn't install Oracle AS after all. So I thought I'd at least be able to get the Portlet Development Kit running, since it requires just pure Java. That way I'd be able to do some portlet development even if I couldn't do real portal stuff.
I figured the easiest way would be to grab the pre-seeded OC4J that includes PDK (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/pdk.html). First off I wasn't able to get it started on the first try, because the darned thing looks for a Java compiler in the JRE path /usr/lib/j2re1.5-sun. That makes no sense, a JRE isn't supposed to have a compiler. That's only in the JDK, which on my box is /usr/lib/j2sdk1.5-sun.
So I have to edit the server.xml to point it at the JDK, then I was able to get the OC4J started. However when I tried to load the front page on localhost:8888, the thing threw an out-of-memory error. When I poked around in the log files I saw that it had been attempting to load a JAR file with a path like this:
/portal/jlib/../../portal/jlib/../../portal/jlib/..
That just repeating for line after line. It ran out of memory not from the file itself but because the path name it was trying to find was too long. I have no idea where that setting is, why it's looping endlessly trying to build an infinitely long path name.
So I've been trying to go the hard way, install a plain OC4J and then install the PDK stuff manually. It's slow going and I so far have not succeeded. But at least my OC4J does run now, and I can load the main page without throwing an out-of-memory exception.
On the bright side, I also went ahead and got JDeveloper (http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/jdev/index.html) installed. I did that to give myself a second, working OC4J (one is included with JDeveloper to let you test servlet/jsp type stuff).
Interestingly, when I went to configure the database connection it did not automagically pick up my XE database, the way SQLDeveloper had. I find that odd since SQLDeveloper is at least partially built out of JDeveloper components. You can see a number of JDev jars installed with SQLDeveloper.
So that's where I'm at now, I have all the dev tools but none of the containers I need to test with. I'm going to give it another few days of effort, if I don't make it I'm switching to Jetspeed (http://portals.apache.org/jetspeed-2/) and Pluto (http://portals.apache.org/pluto/).