Indeed... there were dependencies to apache common's stuff...

I wonder if these are supposed to be copied in libs each of the portlets, or eventually the build will put them there? It is kind of wierd that when i placed commons-digester.jar in the portlets lib folder inside of plugins, the deploy target seems to erase it... I had to put these libs straight in tomcat...

I will research further about how to propperly deal with these dependencies...

I appreciate the tip! The portlet works when i put the dependencies in...

thanks!

Thanks Greg!

So, what i found out is that the build script and properties hava a dependencies portal dependencies setting:

portal.dependency.jars=

inside of liferay-plugin-package.properties

The jars specified in that property are temporarly copied to the war for compilation, but are erased from it before packaging it... I'm not sure that makes sense... That would sound like you are expecting these jars to be globally available on tomcat... But they are explicitly copied from the portal web app (ROOT in case of tomcat) ... So, it feels like there is an expectation that because these jars are in ROOT/WEB-INF/lib, they will be made available to other portlets, and that is not the case...

The part of the build script that does this copying is in build-common-plugin.xml in the plugins root... It is the 'war' target....I've modified it slightly to make it work in this case, and then i put the extra deps i have in the portal.dependency.jars above (such as the digester)..



What I don't know here is what was the original intention of these portal dependencies, and if indeed there was an expectation that they would be makde available to external war portlets in means that are not currently working or what...

Perhaps someone @ liferay could illuminate us?

Thanks!

Hmm, I stumbled upon the same problem, came to the same fix (moving the antcall to after the zipping process) and have now found your post. This is still the same as of Liferay 5.2.3. I really wonder if that is not a bug??