About Liferay component pre-processing on WAS 6.1

WAS does not support the hot deployment of components. However, Liferay's deployment code must update plugins by adding necessary libraries and configuration files.

For example, Liferay's portlet deployment code adds the following important piece of configuration to a portlet component's web.xml file:

<context-param>
  <param-name>com.ibm.websphere.portletcontainer.PortletDeploymentEnabled</param-name>
  <param-value>false</param-value>
</context-param>

This context parameter is important for WAS deployment, as it ensures that WAS's portal server does not attempt to load the new portlet, and instead allows the Discovery Framework to load the newly deployed portlet.

For this reason, Liferay must be allowed to pre-process components before they are deployed to WAS. You upload your .war files to Liferay's deploy directory so that Liferay's deployer can find and process them.