Sun RSS Portlet in GridSphere

OK, thanks to Suresh and Marcus, I got the Sun RSS portlet working in GridSphere. Very good indeed, since the others that I found depended on Liferay or JBoss jars. Good grief, people, you are getting on my last nerve.

Here are the steps:

1. Get the portlet from here: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/OpenPortal/RSSPortlet
2. Do the usual gridsphere stuff: you will need to modify web.xml, copy over the gridsphere-portlet.xml from a working portlet into WEB-INF, copy over a gridsphere-ui-tags.jar from a working portlet into WEB-INF/lib. Also a group.xml and layout.xml file in WEB-INF will help. Plenty of examples of this over at http://www.collab-ogce.org/.
3. Also touch webapps/gridsphere/WEB-INF/CustomPortal/portlets/rssportlet
4. For some reason, the Sun portlet doesn't include the necessary jars to support the portlet's tag libraries, so you will need to get these and put them into WEB-INF/lib: jstl-1.0.6.jar, standard-1.0.6.jar.

This should be everything. The missing jar problem in step 4 was the frustrating part. Here's a list:

content-0.4.1.jar jdom-1.0.jar rome-0.8.jar
gridsphere-ui-tags-2.1.jar jstl-1.0.6.jar standard-1.0.6.jar


Probably there is an easier way, but around here we like to do it the bassackwards way.

Some BLAHP Notes

BLAHP is a plugin to Condor-G that enables Condor to submit jobs directly to schedulers like PBS/Torque. It is a variation of the GAHP scheduler that Condor-G uses to submit Globus jobs. Globus in turn provides the appropriate job manager for interacting with local scheduler. BLAHP (hopefully) will allow us to skip this step.

BLAHP is avaialble from the EGEE; see https://twiki.cnaf.infn.it/cgi-bin/twiki/view/EgeeJra1It/BLAH_guide for an overview. There is an obsolete version of this in the Condor release, but we must override.

We are interested in this because Condor-G and Birdbath provide a Web service programming interface for managing jobs. See other notes on this blog and at http://sangpall.blogspot.com/. We'd like to use this service for accessing machines that don't run Globus GRAM.

Basic steps for getting this going are the following. All steps are done on the same server.

1. Install Condor and optionally Globus.
   
2. Get the latest Condor C++ Classads, configure, make, make install
   
3. Check out BLAHP from CVS, configure, make, make install
   
4. Get Torque if you don't have a scheduler installed, configure, make, make install.

Notes are courtesy of Francesco Prelz, with some corrections from Yu Marie Ma. I'm building this on RHEL4.

Install Classads

• Make an installation directory. I'll call this BLAHP.
  
• wget ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/condor/classad/c++/classads-0.9.9.tar.gz
• Unpack and cd.
  
• ./configure --prefix $HOME/BLAHP/classads/ --enable-namespace --lib-name classad
• make; make install

The trick is the configure step. You must enable the classad namespace (at least on RHEL4) for BLAHP to install (divined by Marie).

Install BLAHP
I also do these steps from the $HOME/BLAHP directory.

• cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@glite.cvs.cern.ch:/cvs/jra1mw co org.glite
• cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@glite.cvs.cern.ch:/cvs/jra1mw co -r glite-ce-blahp_R_1_11_1_0 org.glite.ce.blahp
  
• cd $HOME/BLAHP/org.glite.ce.blahp/
  
• ./configure --with-classads-prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/classads/ --with-globus-prefix=$HOME/globus/ --prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/blahp

Install Torque

This assumes you don't have this already installed. The steps below will work for a non-root build.

• cd $HOME/BLAHP
• ./configure --prefix=$HOME/BLAHP/torque --with-server-home=$HOME/BLAHP/torque
• make; make install

Configure BLAHP
We now need to configure BLAHP to work with our local Condor and Torque installations.

TeraGrid RSS Feeds

Here's a big list of TeraGrid RSS news feeds. A while back, I wrote a post complaining that these didn't work correctly in iGoogle, but I'm pleased to write now that this has been corrected. On the downside, you have to go through a few pages to find the RSS URLs.

You can guess the subject for each feed from the title (rss-indiana.rss is the IU feed, for example).

http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-education.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-event.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-gpfs.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-indiana.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-lsu.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-ncar.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-ncsa.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-nics.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-networking.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-ornl.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-psc.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-pr.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-purdue.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-sdsc.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-gateways.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-archives.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-tacc.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-general.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-anl.rss
http://news.teragrid.org/feeds/rss-vis.rss