Why i hate Weblogic Workhop & Portal

My current work requires me to maintain and enhance an Weblogic
Portal application. I’ve inherited it and the first thing
i’ve noticed is that it actually does not need portal at all.
It’s just 3 portlets and user has no ability to personalize it so
simple jsp with 3 includes or Struts tiles (or Sitemesh) would do..

But this is not what this story is about. Before that project i was
a happy Eclipse user (and i’ve been using Idea, NetBeans, Joe and
Vi too
) working on different projects in different j2ee scenarios. And out of
the suddent i’m in the middle of the strange weblogic world..

My first reaction after starting up and playing around a bit with workshop was “File/Exit” start up Eclipse…

But since the guys here did everything using pageflows and bea
portlets so unless i want to do everything manually (pageflow
annotations, portal xmls etc.) and use ant build that takes ages ,
i’m trapped in Workshop.

And why i hate is so much? Just take a look:

- Workshop sucks as a java editor. It does not have 1/100 of needed
features. Not even a simple “generate getters/setters”.
Probably that’s why in the code I’ve inherited from
consultants they avoid getters and setters like fire and access the
fields directly
Ok, maybe not just because of this… BEA should eat their pride
and build something on Eclipse or offer a decent set of plugins.
Workshop realy feels medieval and visual pageflow editors does not help
since most of us spend most of the time in the source code window.

- The editor does not do incremental builds of the whole project so
to notice errors not in your current file you have either to open the
offending file by mistake or do the full build. To illustrate this:
open a class file and change a commonly used method name and save it.
Any errors? Nopes..

- If you work in the ‘iterative development’ mode (where
you rely on the weblogic server to notice changes and recompile stuff
for you - because you do not want to do full build every time, belive
me) and you make a mistake like the one above it’s even worse - i
had one example where the server, after i saved the modified file,
acted like it actually does the right thing, the app was quickly
redeployed (luckily weblogic has 2 redeployment modes quick and full)
but it acted like nothing has changed (=still running my old class).
And no error message on the console Just imagine what a pain in the ass it can be.

- Then you finally decide to do the full build to see all the errors
and the build takes AGES. Not only it rebuild all the files in the
project no matter if it makes sense or not but it also compiles tons of
.jcx files (weblogic controls). To make the matter worse i use only 2
of them in the project but it recompiles all of them EVERY SINGLE TIME.
You think i did something wrong with my project? No way
Do the following exercise: create a fresh weblogic portal project and
cling on build… you see? click on build again.. oh.. it does it
again.. If you know how to disable this i beg you LET ME KNOW

- EJB overdose and un-modularity of the portal itself: the portal
consists many ejbs that get deployed whenever you need/want them or
not. And i’ve found no way to disable it and i would realy like.
You see, we use Portal just as a portlet container + skin manager. I do
not need the content manager etc. But nevertheless i have it
It steals my time and resources. I had to resort to some tricks to slim
it down a bit. They are unsupported (editing the original .jar files
and removing descriptors inside them - i could not remove the whole jar
as they also contain classes used by other portal modules) and when i
will upgrade to another service pack i will have to start my fun
again…

- BEAs strange update policy. To my knowledge BEA is not releasing
any hotfixes for general consumption. They only release “Service
Packs” from time to time. The problem with them is that they also
add features and not only fix bugs. You may like it with you Windows XP
service pack when you get some new stuff for free but i do not like it
with my “enterprise” software stack. Last time i did SP3
update of a project it happily changed my deployment descriptors and
actually re-enabled all the beans and other things I’ve carefuly
disabled by hand. It has also added few new EJBs for my pleasure and
joy. Silently and without asking. It has also modified my domain
configuration and added new authenticator that did not even work in my
case so the whole authentication in my app went down.

- Lack of good information on the web. I consider myself quite good
in the regard of google usage. But no matter what i did i could not
find solution for half of my bea problems on the web. The reason for
this is probably simple: most of the heavy action occurs between bea
consultants and paid customers and it never sees the light. So the only
thing left are the public forums (they are OK but did not help in my
cases) and the rest of the net that does not seem to care about
weblogic that much. With any decent/mainstream opensource project i can
find a good mailing list that have solutions for most of my problems
(I’m almost never the first guy to have them).

And guess what.. i will do my best to de-BEA-ize this application
ASAP. Then i will also de-Portal-ize it. Cause i’m just fed up
with all this crap.

But before that happen, i’ve a gut feeling that it’s not my last bea related post..