HCL Digital Experience Development Environment

HCL Digital Experience Digital Experience Forum
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1

I am curious what are you guys using as the development environment for HCL Portal?

We currently run RAD + WebSphere Portal on our local workstations. However performance is not great. Publishing to the server takes a lot of time. Debugging is also slow. I guess this is a bit of a survey question. What is everyone using for development? How happy are you with the setup?

Thanks.

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First off, we don't develop Portlets very much. When working on the Portal, we tend to mostly just use Eclipse without the RAD part. However, after having said that, I do use RAD when it makes sense.

I do have Eclipse plus a locally installed Portal on my Linux system. But beware, the latest Linux kernels (6.0+) don't play nice with the Portal Java. Lately I've found myself using a Docker container on which I remote debug attach to Eclipse for any serious work.

Also, what OS are you using?? I use Linux which has great file system performance. A lot of folks use Mac in our team and it's pretty well know that the Mac file system is significantly slower than Linux. In fact, most folks use a Linux VM on their Mac for that very reason. I can't speak to using Windows because (literally) no one on the Dev team uses Windows.

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Also curious about how much memory you have in your local workstation. With RAD + Local Portal, you'd need 16Gig minimum and more if you have other processes running. Personally, most of us have 32Gig.

4

Hi Vlad,
similar like Alex I am also using Eclipse + Docker plugin and the DX images to develop new portlets. For deploying or updating portlets I am using the dxclient. You can also use Microsoft Visual Studio Code to develop new portlets. There is a nice sample available at URL:

https://github.com/HCL-TECH-SOFTWARE/dx-portlet-development-utilities/tree/main/hcl_dx_jsp_demoportlet_archetype

That also gives you instructions in how to use dxclient to deploy new portlets in VSC.

At all I think it make sense to use the dx-docker images along with any IDE and then to use dxclient at all. That is the new way that I would use to develop new portlets.

I hope that helps
Thanks, Thorsten