LDN - Luminis Developer Network

We've been working on cached RSS newsfeeds - a popular part of a portal. I've been a bit at a loss recently as to why, in spite of setting the proxy server and proxy port, the rss feed wasn't working when deployed to the live system. Well, I was setting the proxy values in the wrong place - tho' it isn't immediately obvious (to me anyway) what the right place is! I was setting them as System Environment variables - the sort you set through the control panel. I sort of imagined that tomcat picked those up at startup and the sub processes of the portlets picked them up. This did not work, however. And setting them within a portlet doesn't work (too late, I suppose - since the thread gets it env from the tomcat thread which started before the portlet). Typing 'env' in the cygwin window shows lovely proxy settings just so, but they never get to the RSS portlet. No, the oddity is that you must set your proxy port and proxy host via configman in order to get the tomcat thread to pick them up. Maybe you could put them in your CATALINA_OPTS or suchlike - tho' it's easy to do it via configman. So you just have to set a http.proxyPort and a http.ProxyHost as per usual - but don't do it via system env variables, but via configman instead. If anyone knows why this is the way to do it, post a reply (I'm guessing that it's deep down in the uPortal code somewhere).

Anyway, I'd been quietly puzzled by this for about a week until the light dawned. And this blog is just to reduce the likelihood of anyone else having to puzzle away for that long! Perhaps everyone else knew this, but....