Websphere Portal Server implementation

I have not been updating my blog lately. So now I'm trying to put together what I have been learning for the past 2 month. Been busy setting up the new Websphere Portal (WP) infrastructure for my company. It have been quite a long process. WP is like 1000 pieces puzzle compare to Lotus Domino 100 pieces puzzle. There are so many things to do to get a proper WP environment up and running. And there are still fine tuning to be done. Maybe we lack in experience for WP but definitely it is not a simple system to setup.

Next is the development of some portlet applications. I have familiarize myself with Portlet Factory and managed to portletize some Lotus application. In my previous job, I have created portlet using Websphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD). Definitely Portlet Factory has made it much easier to than WSAD. Almost every now and then I find some cool feature in Portlet Factory. I will share more of this in the next few writeup of how I've portletize an Lotus Application.

Through so many Lotus blogs, I have learn so much. Lotus community have been very willing to share their experience and that is great. I'm hoping to learn from Websphere Portal/Portlet Factory blogs. I did a quick search on Google for Webpshere Portal Blog and Portlet Factory Blog. What a let down. I manage to find only a handful of blogs and not all of them are updated. If you know any good Guru out there, appreciate you could leave the URL on the comments. I did a search on Lotus Notes Blog and can definitely see the big different in numbers of blogs. Hmm... do Lotus community have more time to blog? Maybe Lotus tools have make things simpler thus we have more time to blog.

Pottermania

The hype is on for Harry Potter final book. Things here in Malaysia is slightly more calm. Yes, there are some bookstore/hypermarket where queue started as early as 5:00am to wait for the store to open at around 7:00am. You don't normally see people queue to get into a bookstore. Better still Harry Potter book sold here is not cheap. In fact it is damn expensive. The recommended retail price is going for MYR 109.90. I would not pay that sum for a story book. Some hypermarket are selling it for MYR 69.90. That's slightly more reasonable. But it is still expensive. Three major bookstore are boycotting selling Harry Potter books because hypermarket is selling them for much cheaper. I think that is their lost. Other bookstore selling at retail price but are giving some discount and some them sold out the books.

Anyway I was at a hypermarket to shop for groceries and saw the book. Nope there we no queue. I grab a copy at MYR 69.90 but sorry to say that I'm not a big fan of Harry Potter. It's been 4 days since I got the book but I have not even started the first chapter. Trying to finish another book I'm reading now. Looking at some positive review on the web, I think I will start on the book soon and hope it doesn't disappoint.

Export text file with Chinese character encoding

I use an Lotus Script agent to create a text file which get data from documents. Things are working fine until some user starts to key in Chinese characters.

Initially the partial code is as below

Dim fileNum As Integer
Dim filePath
fileNum% = Freefile()
filePath = 
Open filePath For Output As fileNum%

The Chinese characters will be shown as boxes in the file. This definitely have to do with the encoding. After some searching I found an easy way to add in the encoding in the the file. Charset = "UTF-8" need to be added to enable proper exporting.

Sample code as below

Dim fileNum As Integer
Dim filePath
fileNum% = Freefile()
filePath = 
Open filePath For Output As fileNum% Charset = "UTF-8"

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