The Fairly Easy Part
My first steps along this road were almost identical to those that I undertook when implementing JSPWiki, so I'll not bother with the details of those here, other than to itemize them for future reference. For those who would like detailed, step-by-step accounts of these processes, I'll refer you to the earlier article related to that product at http://www.webspherepower.com/issues/issue200408/00001325001.html.

Briefly, I performed the following tasks:

• Opened up WebSphere Studio Application developer to the J2EE perspective (I was using v5.1.2.1, but most of the steps are applicable to any 5.x version).
• Created a new Enterprise Application Project called Roller, and subordinate Web project called RollerWeb.
• Imported the contents of /roller-demo/Webapps/roller into the WebContent folder of the Web project.
• Imported the contents of /roller-demo/Webapps/roller/WEB-INF/classes into the JavaResources folder of the Web project.
• Opened up the Properties dialog for the Web project and changed the context root from RollerWeb to simply roller.

At that point, my workspace looked something like what you see in Figure A.

FIGURE A


The WebSphere Studio Application Developer workspace after importing Roller. Roll over picture for a larger image.

Astute readers will recognize the little red icon in front of the WebContent folder as being indicative of an error condition. More often than not, this kind of thing happens when you take software that runs perfectly well in other environments and try to make it work in the WebSphere world.

In this particular case, it was actually a relatively minor little indiscretion related to the fact that a .jsp file with a page directive included a .jsp fragment that also contained a page directive.

WebSphere only likes to see one page directive per fully resolved .jsp. I corrected this by deleting the first three lines of comments-header.jspf, as you can see in Figure B.

FIGURE B


Delete these three lines to resolve the project error. Roll over picture for a larger image.

A quick(?) rebuild of the Web project resolved all but the warning-level messages in Figure C.

FIGURE C


After the project is rebuilt, all errors should be resolved. Roll over picture for a larger image.

At this point, we would be ready to give it a go, but there are two issues with which we still need to deal: application security and the target database.

The Roller Database
As I mentioned previously, the Roller demo, from which I am obtaining my project artifacts, comes bundled with, and configured for, the HSQLDB (HyperSonic SQL Database) pure Java embedded database. This is a great product for such a demo, but I wanted a real database behind my implementation of this product, so I needed to build one and reconfigure the application.

Since both Roller and I are familiar with working with MySQL, I decided to use MySQL as my back-end data repository. To be totally honest, I initially had aspirations of using MS SQL Server for the database, but I don't want to completely embarrass myself by going into the details of that entire fiasco, so let's just all pretend it was MySQL right from the start.