Rails JSR286 portlets

This project makes possible to deploy Rails applications so that each controller action is displayed as a standard Java portlet specified in the JSR286 portlet specification. This solution has the advantage of agile Rails development methods paired together with strong support and commercial acceptance of J2EE frameworks. The user management, page layouts ("window management") and other such common application principles can be shifted off the Rails developer to the main framework. The developer can focus on creating unique features straight from the beginning (given that the underlying database has been already modeled).

Support

This documentation and the examples are using Liferay on Tomcat as the reference platform. Currently this is the only supported platform, but the build system is extendable for other portlet containers. Patches are welcome!

Caterpillar

Caterpillar is a helper for Ruby (and Rails in particular) which handles the Rails-portlet configuration and deployment. Caterpillar contains the Rails-portlet JAR, so Caterpillar is the only package you'll need to install to build Rails-portlets for the portlet container.

The features and goals are:

install the Rails-portlet JAR into Liferay
process the portlet XML configuration from named routes
provide a list of portlets in development
offer a set of migrations to help with Liferay integration (co-dependent with the lportal gem)
Rake task 'fixtures' imports live data from the production database for testing
make the whole process configurable in Ruby

Due to changes in Liferay 5.2 API, Rails-portlet is no longer compatible with Liferay 5.1. Caterpillar-0.9.5 is the first version to support Liferay-5.2, and installs an older JAR for Liferay 5.1.

Gem can be installed by

$ sudo gem install caterpillar

Documentation is available online.
SVN is browsable at Rubyforge. The checkout URL is svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rails-portlet/trunk/caterpillar